Charley Boorman
I was a child actor in 'Deliverance,' but not the banjo player. It was my dad's big movie as a director, and at the very end there's a scene where Jon Voight comes home to his wife. I played his young son.Collection: Home
I think it's really important for people to have a passion... a hobby... riding horses or climbing or riding motorcycles or whatever it is. It's very good for the soul. And if you can find a soulmate with whom you can share similar experiences with... one who enjoys them as much as you do, then it's kind of a match made in heaven really.
Travel is the spice of life.
I lost my sister Telsche to ovarian cancer in 1997 and my grandparents on my mother's side both had cancer but well into their 70s.
I grew up in Ireland, in the Wicklow Mountains just behind Dublin, and got a job in a Volkswagen garage when I was 14. I did it in the summer for about five weeks. My father thought it would be a great idea because I was really into bikes.
When my sister died, I had my first child.
I grew up in Wicklow, near Roundwood. It's a beautiful place on the east coast. That's where I started riding bikes.
Excalibur' was a quest for my father. I remember it was manic on the film set. And we had these massive castle sets. I think my dad was under tremendous pressure making the movie because there was so much going on. I remember it was a hard one to make - a lot of stress and strain.
People warned us off lots of countries. Someone would say, for instance, 'Stay away from Sudan. It's full of thieves.' And we'd say, 'Have you been there then?' 'Er, no.'
You need to think Gucci when you are camping - make things as luxurious as you can.
We discovered that often it was better to sleep in a nice familiar tent than to go off and look for a hotel.
Sitting on the back of my motorbike going from west to east through Mongolia was one of the most inspiring and awesome experiences I've ever had. There was so little influence of the western world.
There's a symmetry of blissfulness about Mongolia. It was a real privilege to be there.
I have been working since I was three.
The Irish are great talkers and incredibly friendly, it's just in the DNA.
I customise and build motorbikes and I can fix them myself.
Apart from my weight, I wouldn't change anything about the way I look: you've got what you've got - make the most of it!
I have a permanent moustache so I can be a 'Movator:' I take random telephone numbers and ring people up and 'movate' them to grow moustaches.
I think obviously when you're first diagnosed with cancer you definitely panic and that your mind races and thinks the worst but I was extremely lucky.
Like many men, I had never thought of testicular cancer and was lazy at getting check-ups.
At the time when I was going to school in Ireland people didn't really have a clue about what it was, so I had to spend a lot of my time trying to explain to teachers what dyslexia meant.
I found I was being pushed to one side and I was being ear-marked as being thick, which is a very damaging thing to be told as a young kid.
Often dyslexic kids will excel in being a little bit mischievous or tying to find attention in other ways because they're not getting it in class.
If anybody has walked down the road and someone says turn left and you take a right that's a form of dyslexia. If you write a number down backwards or you get the numbers mixed up a little bit occasionally, that's a form of dyslexia.
It's very rare that you get that period of time to hang out with your best buddy and ride motorbikes.
You hear stories about the horror crashes of the Dakar Rally, which is a long 16-day race, and about people getting lost in the desert, and they're all true. Every 20 minutes, you were just about to crash. Bikes, cars and trucks all race at the same time.
I remember taking a 4x4 up the Sani Pass in South Africa, which goes up into Lesotho. It's a dangerous hairpin trail on this treacherous road and I went up in winter. Half of the road stays in the shade. We turned the corner on this hairpin and just hit black ice.
I broke both legs, which is why I ended up lying in bed for three months. It was six months before I could walk on one leg.
I've crashed a lot in the past.
The experience of riding an electric bike is very different. Because there was no engine noise and no big vibration coming from the bike, it wasn't as stressful.
Ewan McGregor and I ate a lot of strange things on our motorcycle journey around the world, but the strangest had to be a meal we had in Mongolia.
The thing about Mongolia is that it's incredibly difficult to grow vegetables there, so mostly we ate muttony stews.
I had a wife and children. I was mostly working in painting and decorating and then taking the occasional acting job as they came along. At that stage in your life you have to think about your priorities. It looked like I was going to have to take the building more seriously and give up acting.
Everyone needs a bit of adrenalin in their lives.
Children aren't meant to die before their parents.
My performances in auditions were so inept that I hardly got any jobs in film or TV. I just could not learn the lines and the thought of doing theatre terrified me. What if I forgot my lines in the middle of a scene with an entire audience watching?
If you are going to try and convince somebody to travel, do it with a small map - the distances look like nothing on a small map.
I had a wife, kids and a mortgage and my acting career was nowhere, so I was painting and decorating people's homes.
Lee Marvin was my godfather and a very close friend of my father's. My father directed the very successful 'Point Blank' in which Lee Marvin starred.
I'd agree to a film because it sounded like it was going to be filmed in a nice place and only afterwards I would check out the story to find it was rubbish.
I have a reading problem and it's hard for me to read books. But I had no problem with the 'Emerald Forest' script.
Nothing interesting ever happens on motorways or in hotels.
You need to put yourselves in places where adventure can find you.
You need to channel your inner dog: know when you need food and when you need rest. And if you get stressed, know when you need to go walkies.
I always think that a bit sad - that people think their wives would stop them doing what they wanted to do.
Whenever I get home the house becomes messy and chaotic. Kinvara, my daughter, said, 'Mummy, do you like it when Daddy is away, because the house is nice and clean?'
I'm competitive but I'm not butch.
I don't have to win at tennis. I have a friend who is so competitive at tennis I sometimes throw a game because I know it means so much to him.
Mongolia was unbelievable. Great parts of it are completely untouched by modern development, but the roads, when you could even call them that, were terrible and we'd find ourselves on the wrong route without any warning.
I'm amazed how unable I am to deal with the demands that are made on me as an actor. Not the one I enjoy, which is standing in front of a camera or onstage pretending to be someone else but everything else that comes with it.