Man vs. Wild host Bear Grylls is all about teaching you how to survive the worst-case scenario, which we almost found ourselves in when we met up for a chat last Friday in New York City, where he was spending the 24 hours he had between shoots in Texas and Alaska, and I proceeded to drop my tape recorder. Luckily, he hadn’t partied too hard at the event he’d attended the night before celebrating the “Survival in the Modern Era” web series he filmed for Dos Equis’ Most Interesting Academy (he made his entrance rappelling from the rafters and fighting off two fake attackers), and he was able to collect the batteries, put the device back together, check that it still worked, order a cup of peppermint tea (badass, but British!), and fill us in on the future of Discovery’s Man vs. Wild and much more.
ENTERTAINMENT WEEKLY: So the Dos Equis event sounds like it was fun.
BEAR GRYLLS: I don’t spend nearly enough time hanging out at fun things like this. I tend to film, and then want to get home. I’ve got three little boys [Jesse, Marmaduke (aka Duke), and Huckleberry (Huck)]. And then a few times a year, I get wheeled out like a monkey [laughs], I get paraded around to promote the start of Man vs. Wild or some company like Dos Equis. But these ads are cool. I’ve wanted to do urban survival stuff for ages. There’s other stuff I’ve learned through all the special forces kind of training, the combat stuff, the gymnastics stuff, and really, they’re a great excuse to show some of those things.
So you did all your own stunts?
Yeah, yeah. That’s the fun side of doing it for me. I hope to do a film next year for Disney that’s gonna incorporate loads of different stuff. The idea is to kind of base it around Man vs. Wild, so we would be filming in a jungle and then everything starts going wrong. You see a plane crash, and there’s a family on-board, and then a whole cat-and-mouse game in the jungle and me getting the family out of there, and then it ends up in London with fight scenes off the rooftops. Again, it would be fun for me. We’d still keep Man vs. Wild going. We’re hoping to do an urban survival Man vs. Wild at the end of this year. We’re trying to do some escape ones, like escape from Alcatraz. We’re trying to do a Man vs. Wild boot camp, training up normal people and giving them some of these skills. So we’ve got a lot of cool ideas for the next few years at least.
Man vs. Wild returns with new episodes in August. What’s in store for us?
Well, we’ve filmed in Alabama, Norway, Texas, we go to Alaska tomorrow. We did a war special in Vietnam that’s gonna be great.
How’s your finger? [He severed one down to the bone on a razor-sharp strand of half-cut bamboo last month in the jungles of Vietnam.]
It’s still numb, so it’s not great. But it looks okay now, which is good. But you know, we’re never gonna reach the end of our lives in perfectly preserved bodies doing this sort of job. Vietnam is the highlight of the season for me. It’s a full-on place. It just makes you realize these young American kids out of college sent there with no idea, no jungle experience…Unbelievable. It’s a real struggle just to survive let alone fight. So I think that will really resonate strongly with people.
And what will we be watching you eat this season?
What have I had recently… Rattlesnake a couple of days ago. Lots of lizards. [For the record, when Grylls tweeted, "just found a squashed rattlesnake tail from last week's texas desert episode in my pocket and woman in NYC elevator looked a bit surprised!" he was not referring to me.]
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