The Chosen is an American TV series that retells the story of Christ and his followers. The seventh and final season is being filmed over the summer of 2026 and will be screened around Easter 2028.
Featuring Jonathan Roumie as Jesus, Elizabeth Tabish as Mary Magadalene and Luke Dimyan as Judas, The Chosen is free to view and has been watched by an estimated 280 million people worldwide.
In The Chosen in the Wild with Bear Grylls, the British adventurer takes cast members and the series producer, Dallas Jenkins, into Utah’s breathtaking wild places, including the treacherous Castle Valley, Canyonlands, and the Adirondack Forest. Each episode features one of the actors – with Bear as guide – hiking to an extraction point but facing challenges along the way.
These include skydiving, abseiling canyon walls, traversing chasms on slender rope bridges and climbing sheer cliffs. And there is a different type of trial when Bear encourages his companions to try foraged food, such as tarantulas, deer tongue and insect larvae, as well as drinking water strained through a sweaty walking sock.
While there is plenty of heart-stopping action, when even Bear admits to being afraid, an important element of The Chosen in the Wild is Bear’s own Christian faith and the deep conversations that he has with his companions about their lives, careers and faith.
As the series went on general release this August, Bear spoke to BBC Countryfile Magazine about his experiences.
You talk a lot about how going into the wild brings out people’s true character. What is it about the wide, wild world that enables these conversations?
It’s what the wild does, doesn’t it? You only have to go into the outdoors with your kids or with your friends for a walk and something changes, something kicks in. And if you turn the dial up on that, the same thing happens.
You take these superstars into the outdoors and it challenges them, beats them up a little bit; they’re gonna come away tired and with a few scrapes and scars and [feel] hungry and scared at times, but with a light in their eye. And that is the magic of the wild.
I’ve seen it during my job as Chief Scout over all those years, how the outdoors lights young people up in a beautiful way. It’s a unique, brilliant way to get to know people. It’s not face-to-face in comfy chairs like a chat show, where you’re trying to tell a funny story. You’re side by side, doing things together.
How do you believe faith helps people connect with nature?
In a busy city, I feel the disconnection. And then when I go back into the mountains, or even doing simple things, such as cycling in a park or lying on the ground wrestling the dog or dipping my toes in a beautiful river or the ocean, the connection returns. Even just feeling rain on my face or gentle sun on my back.
We’re designed to thrive and to be challenged On Mother Earth. We’re designed to be restored and healed and refreshed by Mother Nature. These are natural, healing, beautiful things that connect us to each other and to Mother Earth.
For me, faith is all of that encompassed. It’s like saying what does blood do in your body? For me, spirituality and nature blend beautifully – it’s a gift for us. The wild outdoors is not the Garden of Eden, though, because it’s still full of pain and drought, storms and snakes and scorpions and tidal waves. So that’s a darker, harder side to nature.
Do nature and the outdoors even challenge your faith?
So much of everyday life challenges my faith but nature restores it a lot. I battle with my faith every day.
I’m no stranger to doubts and fears, I’m no stranger to struggles and moments of like: “all of this is madness!”, and “no, it can’t be true!” I live in those moments probably for the majority of my life. The moments of beauty and restoration I usually find either in friendships or in nature.
What do you hope viewers will get from The Chosen In the Wild?
Ultimately life is about nature, the outdoors, adventure and connection with people, and hopefully we’re all nudging each other towards the good stuff in life. But this show is different because people are so passionate about it.
You’ve got hundreds of millions of fans from all around the world, including many different cultures and they are really desperate to find out what the actual actors are like, and how the show has transformed their journey, and that was fun to get into.
How were bonds formed on these journeys?
These weren’t rookie journeys. We were in some unforgiving, hostile places: forests, mountains, canyon lands, rivers – you’ve got to be on it. We had to depend on each other a lot.
I find stuff hard, they find stuff hard and we need each other, that’s a dynamic. So the bonds are going to be naturally there; they’re created by nature, and then the bonds become reinforced by the vulnerabilities we share together.
So many of these stars were talking about some personal moments for them, filming the show, being part of the show, playing this or that character. These weren’t just Marvel movie characters. They're playing Jesus or Mary Magdalene, and these really became life-transforming roles for them. That comes with a struggle, and the actors were very vulnerable with me and very honest about those battles.
What is one survival skill that you think everyone should know?
People expect me to say fire, or finding water, and those matter. But the one skill that keeps people alive more than any other is learning to control panic. Almost every survival situation starts the same way.
Something goes wrong, the heart rate spikes, and the brain wants to shut down or bolt. If we can catch that moment, slow the breathing, and buy ourselves 30 seconds of calm thinking, everything else becomes possible. The fire, the shelter, the route out. None of it happens while we’re panicking.
And it’s not just a wilderness skill. Life will test all of us at some point. The people who come through aren’t the strongest or the smartest. They’re the ones who learnt to stay calm long enough to take the next small step. As the Navy Seals say, “calm is contagious”. It’s why it is such a key survival skill.
