Prior to his breakthrough as an actor, McQueen worked a whole list of odd jobs including an oil rigger, trinket salesman, and lumberjack. Further pacifying his passion for machines, he took a job as a mechanic at a garage in New York City, not realising that he would have one of his first run-ins with famous faces there. James Dean, himself a lover of motorcycles, one day brought his Indian Warrior TT into the garage for repairs, with Martin Landau sitting on the back behind him. McQueen and Landau would later meet at Lee Strasberg's Actor's Studio, where McQueen revealed that they had met before, as he had been the mechanic that worked on the bike.
