Former Navy Seal's dramatic escape

Elite soldier-turned-Hollywood actor Joel Lambert is the star of a TV show, which ironically, he agreed to do only because "it isn't a Hollywood TV show".

In each episode of six-part Manhunt With Joel Lambert, he is placed in foreign countries, where he has to evade the host country's elite military and law enforcement tracking units to reach an extraction point, where he will be lifted to safety within 48 hours.

While the tracking teams can deploy assets such as helicopters and police dogs, and use vehicles to track and capture Lambert, he is equipped with only whatever his backpack can carry.

The show premieres here on Discovery Channel (StarHub TV Channel 422) next Monday at 8pm.

If you are expecting it to be another gimmicky show tailored to capture the audience's attention, think again.

Lambert, an ex-United States Navy Seal, is adamant that his series is the real deal.

"I'm not making a game of it to show TV. I'm doing what is real in the moment and I'm evading, setting booby traps and these cameras are documenting a real struggle and a real contest with myself, when everything that is to my advantage has been lost," he says in a group telephone interview with the regional media, including Life!.

In fact, he claims he was not interested in being a part of the show in the beginning.

He was eventually won over by the person who came up with the idea for the show - a former Special Forces guy whom Lambert felt was "passionate about doing something very real and genuine based on tracking and on escape and evasion".

The key difference between this show and other military-themed reality shows is that "they all try to take military training or military experience or military operations and squeeze them and form them and fit them into a television show", adds Lambert, 42, who has starred as a member of the Strike Force Team in Transformers: Revenge Of The Fallen (2009).

"In this one, we just took the camera guys and shoved them into a real military operation, except they're just not shooting at each other." Of course, he explains, there are inevitable restrictions to how realistic the show can be.

"Obviously, we don't kill anybody and the missiles don't actually launch, but aside from those small unreal parts, everything else is very real," says Lambert, who is single.

During his 10 years as a Navy Seal, he planned and took part in more than 20 real-world combat missions. He also headed the mission critical ordnance department containing all weaponry and optics for 16 Seal operators and also trained Seal operators and foreign special operations personnel from countries including Singapore, Thailand and Greece.

Now, besides taking on small roles in TV shows such as Mad Men and The Closer, he also works with video game developers.

"I did motion capture for Call Of Duty: Ghosts. If you play that, you're playing me," he says, referring to the first-person shooter video game released last year.

In Manhunt With Joel Lambert, the "game" is far more real. He will be up against teams including the Philippines Army Scout Rangers, South Korean National Police Swat and Poland's border guard.

Filming the show was a big challenge for Lambert and his crew. Over the six episodes and hunts, a producer was stabbed through the neck by a flying fish and almost died, another producer was extracted out of the jungle for heat exhaustion, there were a few cases of anaphylactic shock from severe allergic reaction, a case of dengue fever and 25 broken cameras.

As Lambert says: "The camera guys were trying to keep up with it. It's so real and raw because of that and there were so many injuries."

He faced his most dangerous situation in South Africa, where he was hunted by the International Anti-Poaching Foundation across Kruger National Park.

Then, he was separated from his producer and the communications team, and had only the cameraman by his side in the private game reserve.

Despite knowing that there were crocodiles, leopards and elephants everywhere, he tried to make it to the extract point 1km away.

He was, however, unaware that the hunter force found tracks of lions that were hunting in the area he was in.

"These lions were like right there, within 45m of me as I was sprinting," he recalls.

"So then all of a sudden, the hunt changed. The Discovery producers tried to stop everything and they sent everybody out. The hunter force was still hunting me, but they were trying to save me instead of catching me."

Lambert, who thought it was "better to finish and die than quit and live", eventually made it alive to the extraction point together with the cameraman.

Although that sounded typically full of bravado and machismo for an alpha male, Lambert is not into macho contests.

Asked if he would be up for an all-star survival showdown with other survival specialists such as Bear Grylls, another elite soldier turned media personality, he says: "I don't see survival as a game and I don't see it as a contest. It's not like I'm more of a survivor than you or we're going to have a contest in survival.

"If it's genuine, then I'm very excited about it. If it's something that's kind of a contrived contest for TV, I'm not really interested in that."

This article was published on April 2 in The Straits Times.

Get a copy of The Straits Times or go to straitstimes.com for more stories.