Chris Hemsworth shares emotional journey to help father fight Alzheimer’s disease
Hollywood meets science: Thor star’s most personal battle yet as he helps his father navigate Alzheimer’s through a nostalgic road trip across Australia. We talk to the expert behind the research.
It’s Chris Hemsworth unlike you’ve seen him before. In what’s being billed as an “intimate and uplifting” documentary, the Australian movie star turns the camera on himself and his father, Craig, who was recently diagnosed with Alzheimer’s disease.
Together, they embark on a “road trip back in time” revisiting places from their past to explore the science of social connection and rekindling forgotten memories to examine how both are important to brain health.
“This is a photo of me and my dad and …” an emotional Hemsworth says in the trailer for the National Geographic documentary, Chris Hemsworth: A Road Trip to Remember.
Hemsworth is holding an old polaroid of himself as a child with his dad. Their resemblance is uncanny. “I love this photo,” he says once he can recompose himself.
“He has early stage Alzheimer’s … I want to do everything I can to help him … Turns out, this experience could help fight the disease.”
For Chris, this has been a deeply personal issue ever since finding out, in 2022, he carries two copies of the gene ApoE4, meaning he is eight to 10 times more likely to develop Alzheimer’s. The discovery was made during filming for a previous documentary, Limitless, which explored themes of longevity.
That discovery saw him step back from acting for a time and continues to have a profound impact on the actor, forcing him to shift his focus and aiming to live “better”.
In this new series, concepts of social frailty, connections, and brain health are the focus. They are also important to Suraj Samtani, a postdoctoral fellow at the Centre for Healthy Brain Ageing (CHeBA). He is also a clinical psychologist with the University of NSW and his work is featured in the documentary.
“I’m just so excited for this documentary to come out, because it’s a one-of-a-kind journey,” Dr Samtani told The Australian. “It’s a very deeply personal journey about Chris and his father, Craig, who has early stages of Alzheimer’s disease.
“We really wanted to combine the power of social connections, which is based on our work here at the CHeBA, and reminiscence therapy, which we know is really helpful in boosting mood and cognition. We brought these two together with the concept of a road trip and also recreating the family home of the Hemsworths from when Chris was a teenager.”
Dr Samtani said he hoped the Hollywood star power provided by the Hemsworth name helped to break down stigma around dementia and provided people with a greater understanding of the disease. “What I love about the documentary is that it has really practical strategies for people to slow down cognitive decline,” Dr Samtani said.
New research led by Dr Samtani and Annabel Matison, both with the CHeBA, concluded that older adults experiencing social frailty, defined as a lack of social connections and resources or support, face a significantly higher risk of developing dementia.
“We analysed data from the Sydney Memory and Ageing study, which followed 70 to 90-year-olds for up to 12 years,” Dr Samtani said.
“We wanted to know, even after accounting for all the other known risk factors for dementia, does social frailty matter? We found that was a resounding yes. People who were socially frail, their risk of dementia was almost 50 per cent higher compared to those who had good connections.
“We see people caring about mental health and physical health, but it’s time that we started paying attention to our social health as well.”
A Road Trip to Remember puts lessons from that work into practice and researchers hope their findings will encourage doctors to consider screening for social frailty and increasingly turn to social prescribing in primary care to help people age better.
For Dr Samtani, the documentary is the type of platform he could never have imagined was possible.
“The fact that we now have the opportunity to share our research findings, not just with a handful of people who might read a journal article, but with potentially millions of viewers all around the world and help raise awareness about dementia and how social connections can slow down cognitive decline; that just means the world. That’s why I do this work.”
His favourite moment from filming was when the production crew recreated the Hemsworth family home from the 1990s. The idea was to stir up old memories from within the brain. Dr Samtani said it was a deeply emotional and moving experience.
“We had goosebumps stepping into this home and not just being there behind the scenes, watching Chris and his family walking. It was such an emotional moment,” he said. “It was just such a beautiful moment and that’s really stayed with me. They’re so close and supportive, and they’re really rallying around Craig as he grapples with changes in his memory.”
The documentary also provides practical examples of how to improve social connections and other cognitive activities. For those without the extravagance of a production crew, Dr Samtani said there were simple steps people could take to protect their brain health.
“We might not be able to recreate our house from the ’90s like Chris Hemsworth, but maybe we can look at old family photos together, play old songs together, talk about key moments from someone’s life,” he said.
“Think about those moments to give that personal chance to use the power of reminiscence therapy, and the second is to have social connections.”
“Friends and family outside the home talk about lots of different topics and they do activities with us and it’s really good for us to have that social engagement and also someone that we can bond with. That’s great for slowing down cognitive decline.”
Chris Hemsworth: A Road Trip to Remember, premiers on Disney+ November 24.
To join the conversation, please log in. Don't have an account? Register
Join the conversation, you are commenting as Logout