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WASHINGTON, D.C. − Chris Hemsworth is joining a growing list of Hollywood stars opening up about caring for their aging and sick loved ones.
Care advocates gathered at the Australian Embassy in Washington, D.C. on Nov. 5 for a screening of Hemsworth’s new documentary, “A Road Trip to Remember,” which follows Hemsworth and his father, Craig Hemsworth, on a motorbike trip across Australia. Craig Hemsworth is one of over 55 million people worldwide living with dementia or Alzheimer’s disease.
“I just find myself wanting to spend more time with him,” Hemsworth says in the film’s trailer.
Hemsworth’s documentary will premiere on National Geographic and be available for streaming on Disney Plus and Hulu on Nov. 23, just six months after Bradley Cooper’s “Caregiving” documentary released on PBS in June. Emma Heming Willis has become the face of spousal caregiving through various media appearances and her new book, “The Unexpected Journey,” where she talks about caring for her husband Bruce Willis. Seth Rogen produced a documentary that released in January 2025, “Taking Care,” which brought viewers inside his family’s life as he and his wife cared for his wife’s mother.
“For many years, people just didn’t talk about it,” said Jane Root, CEO and founder of Nutopia, the film production company that made Hemsworth’s documentary. “And suddenly, influential people like Chris and Seth and people are suddenly, like, this is something that needs to be talked about. We need to stop being scared of it, we need to take away the stigma of it.”
The United States is at a critical moment where family caregivers are holding up their families and the country’s long-term care system, said Megan O’Reilly, vice president for health and family for AARP government affairs.
“The more that folks are talking about it and sharing their stories, they’re empowering those around them to share their stories,” O’Reilly said. “I’ve increasingly seen it over the last couple of years… this has been building to this moment.”
‘If Chris can do it, I can do it.’
Hemsworth isn’t new to documentaries or the team that helped make “A Road Trip to Remember.” The film is backed by the same creators (including Nutopia) who made Hemsworth’s “Limitless” series, where he investigated various ways to try and live better for longer.
“My Dad and I had always spoken about taking a trip back to the Northern Territory, where our family had lived years ago, but we had never been able to set aside the time to actually do it,” Hemsworth said in a Facebook post on Oct. 16. “More recently the idea of taking that road trip reemerged with more pressing importance. The result was a more profound, more moving, and more surprising journey than I ever anticipated.”
Charlie Parsons, senior vice president of global development for National Geographic Channel, has worked with Hemsworth since the beginning of his “Limitless” series. He said National Geographic doesn’t look to work with big names for the sake of having a celebrity on a poster. There needs to be an “honest to goodness passion for the subject matter,” Parsons said. And Hemsworth cares deeply about health and his family.
“He was just very vulnerable,” Parsons said. That vulnerability leads to connection, and hopefully will lead to more people sharing their caregiving and Alzheimer’s stories. Parsons said he has found himself opening up more about his own mother’s dementia journey in recent years. “If Chris can do it, I can do it.”
“Now she’s at a point where she doesn’t know who I am,” Parsons said of his mother. “I go in there, and sometimes she’s kind of asleep or kind of dozing off. I just, I hold her hand for 45 minutes and I tell her I love her.”
Unlike other stories of caregiving that tend to focus on the difficult parts of care and aging, Root said Hemsworth’s documentary is a celebratory story.
“It’s a film that makes you smile,” Root said. “It’s about Chris saying, ‘I want to spend time with my dad.’ And he really enjoyed it.”
Madeline Mitchell’s role covering women and the caregiving economy at USA TODAY is supported by a partnership with Pivotal and Journalism Funding Partners. Funders do not provide editorial input.
Reach Madeline at memitchell@usatoday.com and @maddiemitch_ on X.
