Iwan Thomas left red-faced after Scarlett Johansson’s ‘flirting’ causes him mess up interview

The decorated 400m runner, who starred in the 2015 version of Strictly Come Dancing, won medals for Team GB at the Olympics, Commonwealth Games and World Championships. But he didn’t perform so well under pressure as a rookie reporter for TNT Sports.

Being sent to interview one of Hollywood’s leading actresses, Scarlett Johansson, left him so hot under the collar that he returned back to the studio with nothing to show for it.

“I think it was Captain America, she was riding a Harley in a film,” he said on the Full Chat podcast he co-hosts about one of the bumper film’s press calls in 2014 or 2016.

“I got sent from BT Sport (now TNT) to go and interview her. You sit down at these press junkets and you only get two minutes with the superstar. 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!”

The father-of-three fronts the motorcycle show with fellow biker David Prutton, a former professional footballer who is now a Football League presenter and pundit for Sky Sports. Their guest for the latest episode was Steve Keys, a motorcycle entrepreneur who has also appeared on TV as one half of The Easy Riders alongside Red Dwarf star Danny John-Jules.

Keys discussed his long and varied career in the industry during the episode which included him sharing his own experience of working in films, namely casting Northern Ireland racer Jeremy McWilliams to feature beside the big-name actress in the 2013 movie Under the Skin.

“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 said during the episode 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.”