Ewan McGregor and Charley Boorman aired their first travel series, Long Way Round, in 2004. So much was different then.
When the two appealing actors and friends announced they planned to achieve a circumnavigation of the globe on motorcycles and document their adventures on British television, cameras were bulkier, batteries were weaker, drone shots were still a decade off, and it was still possible to drive across Russia without setting off an international incident.
That first season captured 115 days of physically arduous road travel, plodding ever eastward from London to New York. From the start, McGregor and Boorman’s on-camera travel experiences were the real deal, not the kind of staged, celebrity-flattering travel shows that clog Netflix today.
The duo risked actual dangers and injuries, and over their periods of difficulty—and there were many—they couldn’t help but expose their unvarnished personalities in a way that, were they a less charismatic pair, would cause a seasoned public relations agent to shudder. There was skinny dipping and there were fart jokes, like in a buddy picture, but there was also despondency over relentless, virtually impenetrable roads that nearly wrecked them both emotionally.
But around Episode 6 of Long Way Round, something mystical happened. It came after a producer, trying to lift the duo’s spirits, tied a hadduck, a traditional Mongolian cloth, to the tail of McGregor’s motorbike as a blessing.
It was shortly after that seemingly made-for-TV gesture that the pair, with conscious effort, learned to stop fixating on the struggles of the road, embrace the spontaneity of their epic journey, and open themselves up—truly open themselves, not just fake it for the cameras—to the experiences they were having. Once they were able to make that mental switch, both their show and their lives were transformed.
They’ve since filmed more epic motorbike journeys for television: Long Way Down (2007), which took them from the top of McGregor’s native Scotland to Cape Town, at the bottom of Africa; Long Way Up (2020), went from the southern tip of South America across Central America to Los Angeles.
But wasn’t until the ninth episode of that third season, Long Way Up, that viewers were shown just how fateful that mindset switch in Mongolia turned out to be for McGregor and the people he loves. (I won’t spoil the reveal here because it’s one of the most moving examples of the transformative power of travel that I’ve ever seen on television—and as a credit to McGregor’s protection of his private life, the 2004 series had been careful not to exploit it for ratings.)
Now, in 2025, the pair, along with series producers David Alexanian and Russ Malkin, have returned for a fourth adventure, Long Way Home, which has them circumnavigating the pleasantly paved roads of Europe.
McGregor and Boorman are in their middle 50s now—in just eight years, McGregor will be the same age Alec Guinness was when he originated Obi Wan Kenobi in Star Wars, and instead of a hadduck, McGregor has tied his young son’s stuffed animal to the rear of his vintage Moto Guzzi.
Long-distance motorbiking and dazzling panoramas remain part of the Long Way formula and there are still plenty of moments for gearheads to ogle the tractors, snowmobiles, and other weird conveyances that the two run across. But this time, McGregor and Boorman have learned how to devote a lot more time to pulling over so they can delight in the people and places they used to pass in a blur.
Maybe don’t call the shift maturity—the joie de vivre and boyish fart jokes and remain intact, only now they’re more like dad jokes—but life experiences, many of them difficult and endured off camera, have given the pair the urge to slow down and soak in gratitude for the journey. Whenever McGregor proclaims a scenic route has excellent “bridge action” (a bridge with a gorgeous view) or Boorman greets an unexpected twist in the schedule as “an opportunity,” it’s clear that the better word for the deepening of the Long Way series is wisdom. Once, their achievements were about conquering the impossible, but now they’re about connection and meaning.
I chatted with the two ahead of the U.S. premiere of Long Way Home on Apple TV+:
___________________________________________________________________
Jason Cochran: First, I want to congratulate you on making one of the best celebrity travel series that’s ever been made. I mean it! You go to places where shows don’t usually go, and you connect with the people when you’re there. It’s not artificial the way so many celebrity shows can be, so good on both of you.
Ewan McGregor: We’re just not very clever when it comes to choosing places to go! But I’m glad you like it.
JC: People who love travel are going to get a lot out of this show if they haven’t seen it already, because they’re going to see places they just don’t normally see on screen.
Charley Boorman: True!
EM: We hadn’t been to lots of these countries! I’d never been to Norway. I’d never been to Denmark. I’d never been to Finland. I’d never been to Estonia, Latvia, Lithuania. I don’t think I’d even ever been to Austria, and they’re all, you know, days’ drive away from Great Britain. So it was an amazing discovery. Norway is unbelievable to travel in.
CB: Incredible.
EM: It’s been there all my life, and I’m 54! I think it’s just when you’re growing up and it’s the summer holidays and your parents take you on holiday, you go head towards the heat. You go you go to France, you go to Spain where it’s warmer, and people don’t think to go north. But my goodness, it was so amazing up there.
CB: I think all my life since I was a little kid, I’ve been traveling around with with my father, a guy named John Boorman, who made movies all over the world. And as children, we were carted off to all these different places—and then thrown into his movies because we were free and he was too cheap to pay us. Certainly for me, that gave me a kind of wanderlust. Before we did these [Long Way] trips and when I was acting or when I was with my wife, we would travel a lot anyway. I think part of why Ewan and I did this is we enjoy traveling and meeting people so much. Certainly the first one [Long Way Round] was completely out of our depth and we had absolutely no idea what we were doing. But that was the fun of it.
JC: And the series has evolved with you. The first series was partly about the puzzle of travel, the technical and mechanical challenges of getting down that road. Now that you’re older, it’s increasingly about the connections that you seem to be making with the people on the side of the road. Was that a conscious choice when you were planning the production of this series?
EM: I think it’s always been there. It’s just that everything was more compact in this one because we’re in Europe. You know, on the other trips [Long Way Round], it took us days to get across Kazakhstan, and it took us weeks to get across Mongolia. It took us a week to get through far eastern Russia. You’d be riding your motorbike for three days and you could swear the scenery hadn’t changed! [Charley laughs in agreement.] You’d look down to see if you were on some sort of treadmill. “Is someone playing a practical joke?” Just, like, massive distances.
JC: And sometimes, on no road at all.
EM: For this one, we were hitting town after town after town. We’d meet this person in the morning, and then well that we meet some other people at lunch, and different people in the afternoon. It was just thick and fast and it was wonderful in that respect.
JC: And you kept the schedule open so you were able to stop. It wasn’t too rigorously planned.
EM: Yes, that was intentional. We definitely found that the stressy times of the other three trips we’re often because we had to get somewhere to get a boat. [To Charley:] You know, like when we got the boat from Egypt down to Sudan [in Long Way Down], we had to be at that boat, That boat only left once a week. We’d find ourselves rushing through Alexandria. I’d grown up knowing about this amazing town in Egypt, but we drove into it, had lunch, and drove out of it. It was like, “Why do we even bother,” you know? I mean, it was a nice lunch, as I recall.
CB: Excellent lunch.
EM: So this time we tried to take that out of the experience. Don’t plan anything so that we have to be at this place at this time, you know? So we were much freer.
JC: There’s a good travel lesson in that for anyone watching as well for when they take their own. When you add up all the days you spent in front of the cameras for these four series, you now have together been out for a year of your lives doing this. [Ewan bursts out laughing; he and Charley high-five.]
CB: Nice! I like that!
JC: Which is remarkable and is a significant chunk of your existence. I guess you’d never thought about that yet?
CB: No, never!
EM: No one’s ever put it like that before. People talk about the mileage that we’ve done—
CB: We’ve done a lot of miles.
EM: But nobody’s ever mentioned the amount of time! That’s true. That is true.
JC: So the Long Way series make up a significant and meaningful part of the story of your lives and your relationship with each other. Why is it so important for you to keep doing this? There are so many other things calling you that you could be doing.
CB: I think it stems from the fact Ewan and I met 30 years ago on a movie set and our first conversation was about motorcycles. We were doing an interview outside, a motorcycle passed, and the interview was broken up. “Oh, we haven’t seen that motorbike before!” So that’s what we’d speak about the most then. We met when we had small children, and now we’ve experienced a lot together. You know: the ups and downs of life. And when we do these trips, being on a motorbike is a form of therapy. People talk about mental health and well-being—finding something that makes you makes you be in the moment, not want to be somewhere else, not think about the past. When you combine all of that together, even when Ewan I have not spent that much time together, when we get back together, as old friendships are you just pick up from where you were, as if no time has gone by. You just carry on—probably the conversation we were having when we hadn’t seen each other three months ago, which was probably about motorbikes. So I think that part of it is lovely and comforting. We rely on each other when we’re traveling.
EM: The other answer is that we love it! We get such a lot out of it, and in a world that’s been more and more focused on our phones, the fact that we make these shows that inspire people to look up and look out and get out into the world. It makes us very proud.
All four Long Way series can be streamed on Apple TV+.