Northern Ireland motorcycle racing legend Jeremy McWilliams thought he was the victim of a wind up when he was approached to appear in a film alongside a Hollywood superstar.
The 61-year-old former MotoGP rider, a three-time North West 200 Supertwins race winner, starred in the 2013 movie Under the Skin alongside Scarlett Johansson. But the opportunity came as a shock to the Ulsterman.
He was offered the chance by Steve Keys – one half of TV’s The Easy Riders alongside Red Dwarf star Danny John-Jules. And the motorcycle entrepreneur from Sussex has revealed the Glengormley racer dished out a couple of four-letter expletives such was his disbelief about being offered the chance to line up alongside the big-name actress.
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“They said we need someone that is going to ride really fast and that when he turns up somewhere he’s a scary-looking bloke,” Keys told the Full Chat podcast before joking that riders James Toseland and Neil Hodgson had been deemed “too good looking” for the role.
“Anyone that knows Jeremy knows that he’s exactly the opposite. He’s one of the nicest blokes you’ll ever meet. But when he puts his race face on, he’s going to scare the bejesus out of anyone that’s coming towards him, which is what they wanted. So I sent a picture in of him looking moody, sat on a chair in the garage at some race and the minute the director saw it he went: ‘That’s my man’.
“I asked the director if he wanted to speak to Jeremy and he said ‘no, not really’. Basically I could go straight to offer and he said, ‘yeah just go and offer him the part’. I didn’t really know Jeremy that well and I called him and said “it’s Steve Keys here” and he said: “Who? Who’s Steve Keys?” I explained and I thought ‘he still doesn’t remember who I am’.
“Anyway, I said ‘I’ve got you a part in a film with Scarlett Johansson’ and you can imagine him going ‘f*** off’, who the f*** is this?’ He did not believe it. He thought it was one of his mate’s winding him up. It took half-an-hour to convince him that this was a serious thing. I said: ‘All you’ve got to do is speak to the director and show him what you look like in a pair of leathers. It sounds weird but he’ll want you to walk round the corner and look into the camera. Just get whoever to film it on a phone’.
“He did that, sent it to me and said: ‘I just feel like a complete idiot’. I sent it in, that was it, he got the role so he ended up doing about two weeks’ worth of filming with Scarlett up in Scotland.”
The topic came up during Keys’ appearance on the motorcycle podcast that is co-hosted by retired Team GB athlete Iwan Thomas and ex-professional footballer David Prutton. It led to the Olympian telling his own amusing tale about meeting the award-winning American during a press interview for one of the Captain America films she starred in.
“You sit down at these press junkets and you only get two minutes with the superstar,” Thomas added during the episode.
“She’s sat down, he’s (Chris Evans) sat down, I was chatting to her and I thought, being a bit younger and a bit naive, she was flirting with me. She went: ‘Ooh, I like your ink’ and I went ‘Oooh really, this tattoo is from this’ and she goes ‘Oh you work out?’ and I went: ‘Yeah, I used to be an athlete.’
“I’m chatting away and behind her, out of vision, the agent’s gone to me (giving cut sign) ‘you’ve had your two minutes’. They stopped and I said ‘What do you mean I’ve had my two minutes?’. They said: ‘It starts from the moment she sits in that chair’. And I went ‘I haven’t even asked her a question!’ I went back to BT Sport and they said: ‘What did she say about the bike?’ and I went: ‘Nothing, but she liked my tattoos! I had to tell them I’d got nothing from her!”
- Full Chat is powered by Bikesure, the UK’s largest motorcycle insurance broker
