He is a well-known petrol-head who collects classic cars and has travelled the world on his motorbike.
However, Ewan McGregor has revealed he could have been killed in a terrifying crash were it not for the panniers on one of his bikes.
The Scots star recounted his brush with death while travelling from Alaska to Calgary, in Canada, for his travel documentary Long Way Round.
At the time, the star was close to the end of a near-20,000-mile journey for the show that saw him and pal Charley Boorman travel by motorbike from London to New York.
Recounting the horror crash during a fan event in Canada this month, McGregor said: ‘I almost got killed in Calgary. We were coming down into Calgary from Alaska. We were on the freeway and were going to be in Calgary in an hour or two and all the traffic started to slow down.
‘So I slowed down and the next thing I knew I was looking at the sky and was like “Oh s***, what’s happened”.
‘This kid had totally rear-ended my bike. The panniers sat about an inch back from my tyre so they took the brunt of this guy’s bumper and literally saved my life.
‘If he’d hit the tyre I would have gone under his car.’
The crash happened as McGregor was on a 20,000-mile journey with friend Charley Boorman
The crash happened in Calgary where – years later – McGregor met Mary Elizabeth Winstead while filming TV show Fargo. The pair later married after McGregor split from his first wife
McGregor, 57, said the ‘whole bumper’ of the car that hit him fell off onto the road as a result of the collision, adding that it showed ‘he really hit me hard’.
The Trainspotting star said Touratech, the company that made the metal panniers, started putting stickers on the product saying ‘These panniers saved Ewan McGregor’s life’.
He also revealed the cameraman with them during the incident in 2004 opened the driver’s door and ‘there was major dance music [playing] really loudly and the car was full of smoke. He was just not paying any attention’. McGregor said that after telling the driver he would not take any action over the crash, the young man replied ‘Ok dude’.
Despite his brush with death in Calgary, McGregor has previously discussed his love of the Canadian city – where he filmed TV show Fargo in 2017.
It was during his time filming the comedy crime drama that he met co-star Mary Elizabeth Winstead, 40, whom he married in 2022 after divorcing his wife of 22 years, Eve Mavrakis, 58, in 2018.
