Macy, Allen, Lawrence and Travolta on their “hogs.”

Touchstone Pictures

BOSTON The thought of putting John Travolta, Martin Lawrence, Tim Allen and William H. Macy astride Harley-Davidson choppers and send them roaring across the Southwest sounds like a bit of dream movie casting.

Yet there the four of them are right now in movie posters all over the country looking, well, if not Hell’s Angels tough, then at least game in Wild Hogs. Their film, which opens Friday, is about four middle-class, middle-aged Cincinnati businessmen who take their weekend passion for motorcycles on a cross-country trip, and the four stars have been going cross-country themselves for real to beat the drums.

While Lawrence and Allen have caught up with their co-stars on a city-by-city basis, Travolta has been flying Macy to their destination cities — Atlanta to Boston to San Francisco — in his personal Boeing 707. “I have wined and dined Bill around the country and, inclusive of that, all his films are on board my plane . . . and they play regularly just to make him feel at home,” Travolta said with a chuckle.

For a limited round of “one-on-one” interviews with reporters here, they reunited at the Four Seasons Hotel but then split up into “one-on-two” sessions, each reporter meeting Travolta and Macy in one big meeting room, Allen and Lawrence together in another.

Although Travolta and Macy co-starred together once before, in 1998’s A Civil Action, the others had known each other only in passing. “The first time I met Tim,” recalls Macy, “I was doing a cartoon and I said, ‘Hey, I’m doing an animated feature. Did you like working on Toy Story?’

“And he said — and here Macy goes into a very good imitation of Tim Allen’s voice — ‘Worst job I ever had. Hated it! Hated it!’

“ ‘We-e-e-ll, nice talking to you, Tim.’ ”

So how did these four very different kinds of actors — two of whom (Allen and Lawrence) had begun their careers on the stand-up comedy circuit — become such a tight ensemble in Wild Hogs that one might readily believe not only that they’d known each other for years, but had been riding motorcycles together for years. (In real life, Lawrence had never been on a motorcycle before, though he said, “It didn’t take me long [to learn] because I had no choice. I wanted to keep up.”)

By all accounts it was a pretty jolly set. “I think it was clever of them to put two actors with other actors who were stand-up based,” said Travolta. “I think the yin-yang of that was a good thing and we all met in the middle.”

Nevertheless, Allen said there was precious little rehearsal time for them to pull together as a team before the movie camera began rolling, just a couple of weeks riding around Malibu Canyon trying to become acquainted with their bikes. “I mean we met when we’d run the bikes,” explained Allen, “but, without being stupid about it, who doesn’t know John? It’s like when people look at me, they’ve seen me so many times they think they know me. With John, you think you know him . . . and he is pretty much what he is. He’s an 11-year-old retarded child. No, just kidding! He’s just the most engaging guy you’d ever want to sit down with.”

Said the fun-loving Travolta, “I think that collective energy of needing to survive together as artists and making sure it works does something to actors. You rise to this other level where you’re a mix of all things. But the good thing about that is that we forget about the so-called, ‘Oh, we’d better have chemistry.’ In reality, there’s no time for that. It’s survival of the fittest. Together we clicked.”

The Harleys, added Macy, turned out to be “a great common denominator because we rehearsed the scenes and then got on these motorcycles, and that really does bond you to your fellow riders. There are a lot of riders out there who absolutely know what we’re talking about when you get on those motorcycles.”

Of the four, they all agree that Travolta was the best rider. “I had two large Hondas over the years,” said the New Jersey-born Travolta, 53, who came to Hollywood in his early 20s to further his career. “The first thing I drove in California was a Honda,” he recalled, “because I was a struggling actor and it was less expensive to go to auditions with. I enjoyed it.”

Their bike-riding lessons, given by stunt coordinator Jack Gill, weren’t without their spills. “I would just get a little bit ahead of myself. I tend to like to show off,” said Allen, who was more of a car man going into the film. (He has his own custom auto shop in Los Angeles, although he did customize the Harley he rides in Wild Hogs.)

Asked what kind of insurance the studio took out on the picture, Allen laughed, saying, “With Disney, it was probably on a box top.

“Actually, I’m not sure they really thought about it. We were doing things that stunt guys should have done. But the more you do, the better it looks on screen. So they had us riding those bikes a lot. And there were a couple of times we were real close to each other trying to bang fists. But, you know, we’re not really bikers. We act like bikers. We were trained very well. But you’re literally out in the road going pretty fast.

“When you think of what they made us do. All of a sudden there’s a car with this camera hanging out in front of you, and you’ve got to ride, and you’re doing 50, and I’m thinking, ‘Is this a good idea?’

“I raced Trans Ams for six years and I kind of think I know about dynamics. But bikes don’t stop like race cars. I went past Bill [Macy] trying to impress the special effects guys and I said in my head, ‘I’m clearly not going to be able to make this turn.’ I just went right off into the desert.”

“And you easily took the spill,” chimed in Lawrence, the only one of the four who does not want to keep the motorcycle he rode in the film. “I can see that bike in a showroom store and just wave at it,” he said with a laugh.

“Tim was the guy we couldn’t keep up with. He’s a maniac,” said Macy, who takes his share of spills as a sort of running gag in the film, but who had his own share of real-life thrills on his motorcycle. “When we first started riding, I realized I can’t turn. There’s a curve coming and I can’t turn the bike. I am frozen. And I actually did ride off the road. I ran it off the road into the mud.”

Allen said that trying to wrest the bike he rode in the film from Disney to keep has been “like pulling teeth” and so he recently bought a Harley of his own “much to the disgust of my wife. I rode it once in downtown L.A. and around the Sherman Oaks area and I pulled right back into my garage and said this is clearly not going to work for me. There was too much going on on the streets. But around my show or taking it out to the desert in a trailer [is when] I’ll take little rides.”

Despite the strong team they created on screen, the four admit they haven’t seen much of each other between the completion of filming and this cross-country tour. “When you do movies,” explained Allen, “it’s like going to camp. After it’s over you say, ‘We’ll see you’ and you don’t. But I’ll at least throw a stupid phone call to [Lawrence] once a month and he came to a Christmas party at my house.”

To hear them tell it, there are no bruised egos over the movie credits which list Allen first, followed by Travolta, Lawrence and Macy. Actually, said Travolta, that’s the billing in the United States. When the film plays in Europe, Travolta will be billed before Allen.

“I’m above the title, that’s all that matters,” added Macy thankfully. “I used to be just to the right of the poster. Now, I’m happy to be on it.”

Nor are there, considering that Wild Hogs is a movie about a collection of mid-life crises, many mid-life crises in their own lives.

“In retrospect,” said Macy, “when I turned 50, I bought a Porsche, but I didn’t realize I was depressed. And if I was depressed, I didn’t know about it.”

Travolta said he had taken his only moment of real-life mid-life introspection and used it as an improvised line in the movie: “How many summers do we have left?”

“Of course I said that in the film because the character is frightened of [a biker gang] killing us. But the origin of that came from my actually thinking when I turned 50, ‘How many summers do I have left?’ Prior to that point, I had never really thought about it much.”

mjanuson@projo.com