For his last adventure series, “Survivorman,” Les Stroud was literally parachuted into the wild and forced to find a way to survive it.
He did, so now he has another series, “Beyond Survival with Les Stroud,” in which he visits some of the most remote tribes on earth and tries to walk in their shoes. If, indeed, they have any shoes.
“I was in Namibia with the San Bushmen, Sri Lanka with the Veddah, the Mentawai in Indonesia,” Straud told reporters at the TV Critics Press Tour in Beverly Hills earlier this month. He was among the Zulu, too.
And each time, he didn’t just jump into remote villages with his own camera, as he did on “Survivorman.”
To some degree he stuck to what he calls “my signature style” and says “I do all of my own camera work.”
But he adds, “I do have a crew. Because I’m working with all of these different people now, I’m able to, when I speak to you I’m speaking to my camera only. I don’t deal with those cameras. They get all of the peripheral [shots], so I get that luxury.”
How did the various tribes react?
“Every time I met one of these groups of people in these remote locations, the first thing I did was say to them literally, ‘Pretend the cameras are like a bunch of flies buzzing around. We don’t even want to know they exist. We’ll just deal with each other. You teach me. I’ll learn from you, and we’ll go through this experience together,’” Stroud says. “And every single time, they got it, so they didn’t react. They didn’t care. They let them do their thing, and we did our thing.”
“Beyond Survival with Les Stroud” plays Fridays at 10 p.m. on Discovery.