For his latest role, Bradley Cooper leapt onto a hovering helicopter, rappelled down a 400-foot cliff and pulled himself across a 100-foot ravine in one of the harshest climates in North America.
His reward wasn’t an Oscar nomination or a big box office hit. It was a hug from adventurist Bear Grylls and some words of encouragement.
“He smashed it,” Grylls says.
Cooper is one of several celebrities — including Benedict Cumberbatch, Cynthia Erivo, Russell Brand, Troy Kotsur, Rita Ora, Daveed Diggs and Tatiana Maslany — who put their survival skills to the test in a new season of Nat Geo’s “Running Wild with Bear Grylls: The Challenge,” premiering Friday.
Kotsur, who won an Oscar for “CODA,” was tested in the Scottish Highlands, descending 2,500 feet across eight miles of harsh terrain and freezing rivers, including a 150-foot rappel down a waterfall. Because Kotsur is deaf, the two men used rope tugs to communicate. Kotsur’s reward: haggis, a Scottish delicacy in which organ meat is put inside a sheep’s stomach and cooked.
Diggs, a city kid, finds himself in the inhospitable Great Basin Desert in Nevada.
“I don’t know how this is going to go and that’s why I’m doing it,” he says. Diggs learns how to use anchor points, track a target and make a signal fire. His dinner is a tarantula.
The show is not just about survival. Grylls’ guests usually open up and show a different side. Ora talks about her ties to Kosovo, Cooper seems unfazed eating mule deer tongue and Cumberbatch reveals stories about his grandfather. Over a campfire, Grylls goes deeper than many TV interviewers.
“It’s as much about the stars and their own personal journeys and struggles and battles as it is about the adventure and the places,” he says. “I think that combination works well because it doesn’t feel like a performance, like a chat show does, where you’re dressed up and made up and you get three minutes.”
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“The wild strips us all bare, doesn’t it?” Grylls told the AP. “It’s like a grape when you squeeze us, you see what we’re made of. And that’s always the appealing part of ‘Running Wild’ — getting to know the real people.”
One commonality among the guests is that viewers will often hear it was the celebrity’s parents who instilled in them a sense of adventure and testing themselves.
“It’s a reminder just how important parenting is,” Grylls said. “Almost invariably when I ask stars, ‘Where does it come from?’ they go, ‘Oh, my dad was amazing when I was really struggling at school.’ Or, ‘My mum was just such inspiration holding down three jobs.’”
He seems to have tapped into something deep in the human DNA — a need to be able to start a fire, use tools and master the wild. But Grylls thinks it’s more than that.
“I really believe it’s a state of mind. We don’t have to be in the wild to live an adventurous life,” he said. “It’s how we live our life, how we approach our work, our relationships, our dreams, our aspirations, our interactions with people. Are we leaning on the adventure side? Are we always pushing the boundaries, taking a few risks?”