Inside Bear Grylls’s huge nepo baby off-screen life, including his real posh name

Bear Grylls has one of the most interesting on-screen and off-screen lives out of any Brit to make it on television. Celebrity Bear Hunt currently has viewers captivated. As a former British SAS trooper, he’s the ultimate man for all things survival. The 49-year-old TV star has a wild life off-screen, and what you see is only the surface. Here’s a look inside the crazy life of Bear Grylls, including his nepo baby childhood and real name.

Bear Grylls’s real name ISN’T Bear Grylls

via Netflix

While Bear is an amazing name for a survival expert, it’s not actually his real one. He was born Edward Michael Grylls, which is a lot less outdoors-y and a lot more son of a Tory politician – which is actually the case.

His parents are Sir Michael Grylls, a Tory politician, and Lady Sarah ‘Sally’ Grylls, but the nickname Bear came about in a very sweet way.

During a 2011 interview with The Guardian, Bear explained: “I was christened Edward. My sister gave me the name Bear when I was a week old and it has stuck.”

He went to Eton

That’s right, Bear went to Eton where he was a very adventurous student. He wrote a piece for the Mail Online in 2011 looking back on his wild childhood, and remembering how he once attempted to climb the 120ft-high school library dome during his days at the fancy Eton College.

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“The night was clear and the sky bright with stars. A series of rooftops, then drainpipes, put me within 15ft of the library roof, at which point the dome started. The lightning conductor held my weight and I clambered into the lead-lined bell tower, silhouetted under the moonlight, and carved the initials BG alongside the existing RF.”

He met his wife completely naked

Bear is married to British author Shara Cannings Knight, whom he met just before becoming the youngest British person to climb Mount Everest on the 16th of May, 1998, at just 23 years old. On a 2014 episode of Piers Morgan’s Life Stories, Bear shared that the first time Shara saw him, he was running around a beach in Scotland completely naked.

Bear said: “It was freezing on the north coast, and a wave came and took my clothes. I was running around naked, trying to find my trousers. It was the worst timing in the world to fall in love because I was up in Scotland. It was the new year, I was training, staying with a friend, and climbing every day.”

He also PROPOSED completely naked

via Netflix

Going with their strange tradition, Bear explained that he proposed to his wife two years later, while skinny dipping. He confessed that he “pulled the ring from my butt cheeks.”

He owns an island

That’s right, Bear bought his very own Island, Saint Tudwal’s Island West, in 2001. It’s got a garage filled with 4×4 cars, and their house is very off-the-grid. There’s no electricity or running water, and there’s a lighthouse nearby. Bear said it was his “favourite place on the planet.”

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