INTERVIEW: Gordon Ramsay goes more ‘hardcore’ on new season of ‘Uncharted’
Photo: Local guide Harish, right, leads Gordon Ramsay, center, around a roadside stand in Kanur, India. There they meet Nasir, left. Photo courtesy of National Geographic / Justin Mandel / Provided by press site with permission.
Gordon Ramsay, one of the top TV personalities in the modern era, likes to have a little bit of adventure in his life. For clear evidence of this statement, check out season two of his hit reality series, Gordon Ramsay: Uncharted, which returns Sunday, June 7 at 10 p.m. on Nat Geo. On the new episodes, the celebrity chef heads around the world to interact with locals and learn a little bit about their culture and cooking habits. Additionally, he participates in a number of thrilling (and somewhat dangerous) adventures.
“You’re always happy you get a season two, but I really feel that this gave us an opportunity to elevate a number of aspects of it,” said Jon Kroll, executive producer and show runner of the series. “I think we were a little reticent in season one as to what we could ask Gordon to do, and what we learned is ask him to do everything and wait until he says no. And I’m still waiting for that. Across this [season], you can see him do things that are so much more hardcore than you saw in the last season, particularly in Indonesia and Guyana. Those are the two episodes that are off-the-hook crazy.”
The team members at Uncharted devise these adventures by looking at a map of the world. They consider which countries Ramsay has been to and which ones remain unexplored. In their pursuits, they are after diversity and global awareness.
“We try to find countries that are across the course of the season diverse and interesting and all over the globe, which is not very conducive for shooting, but is extremely satisfying I think for viewers to be able to see all these different continents,” Kroll said. “We’ll start to look at, OK, who might our chef be, who some interesting contributors might be. … And then we put together an outline on paper that we discuss with Nat Geo. Usually they love them. Sometimes they’ll say, ‘Can you give me a little more action or another crazy ingredient?’ We then go out on a scout because we don’t believe anything anyone tells us, so we have to go and see if everything is as we were told. We shoot lots of pictures. We come back, and we usually change about 25 percent of it based on what we learned on the scout. And then we go shoot it. It’s sort of a series of steps, but once we go on a scout, we’re pretty committed to that episode happening.”
Kroll, who has produced The Amazing Race, Pink Collar Crimes and American Grit, characterized the new season as more extreme than last year’s inaugural set of episodes. Ramsay, to put it bluntly, is willing to go further than he ever has before. The season opener is an episode in Tasmania, and then comes an episode in South Africa where Ramsay has a close encounter with hippos, giraffes and rhinos.
“It was fascinating to us how fearless he was with interacting with them within the safety guidelines we were given,” Kroll said. “But there are scenes with him with rhinos and hippos, and there’s no fences between them. This is the first show I’ve ever done that has had a hippo safety briefing, and I’m not kidding. We had a safety briefing just for dealing with the hippo that was at the final cook in South Africa, which was not planned. We scouted the place; there was no hippo. We showed up the next day; there was a hippo. So we have to deal with that.”
Another South Africa adventure finds him participating in a recreational event in which he gets dragged behind a couple of bulls in a rice patty. A segment on the Guyana episode finds Ramsay swimming with piranha and making his own arrows to spear some fish. And, yes, the celebrity chef even eats a tarantula in season two. All in a day’s work.
“We obviously like to show up and get everything ready, but the truth is we only have him for less than a week in each episode,” the show runner said. “And so what we do is we find interesting people for him to interact with, who we think he’ll enjoy — both the chefs and contributors, the people who take him to find ingredients and things like that. And we have a rough idea of what he might do, but we just unleash the beast, the beast being Gordon. And he always delivers, as you see. We find a guy who makes whiskey out of sheep shit, and we just send Gordon in and say, ‘Gordon, ask this guy how he makes whiskey.’ And we know that entertainment will ensue from that.”
By John Soltes / Publisher / John@HollywoodSoapbox.com
Gordon Ramsay: Uncharted returns Sunday, June 7 at 10 p.m. on Nat Geo. Click here for more information.
