Eugene Levy did not want to come to Utah. He didn’t want to stay at a five-star luxury resort near Lake Powell.
It’s not that he has anything against the state or the resort. But the star of “Schitt’s Creek” just doesn’t like to travel. Which makes him the perfect person to headline the new Apple TV+ series “The Reluctant Traveler.”
“It’s not that I hated traveling,” he said, “I just didn’t love traveling. I never loved traveling. I don’t love the airport experience. I’m not a fan of sightseeing, generally.”
Levy went on to say that he doesn’t have “a great sense of adventure,” and he’s “not curious by nature. … When people would tell me that they’re traveling all over the world, and I would listen, and it didn’t really mean that much to me.”
(Christina Belle | Apple TV+) Eugene Levy visits southern Utah in "The Reluctant Traveler."
Which is why he turned the producers down — twice — when they offered him the gig on “The Reluctant Traveler.”
The original concept for the show was that Levy would travel to great hotels and resorts around the world. And he wasn’t interested. But he did agree to speak with the show’s executive producer, David Brindley, to tell him why he was all wrong for the show.
“I went through a list of reasons why I’m not the person who should be doing this,” Levy said. “I tried to keep it light, you know? So I was getting laughs. Every [time] I was saying, “I’m not the person,” I’d get a laugh on the other end of the phone.”
Which prompted Brindley to tweak the pitch and the show — it would be about “somebody who is not fond of traveling doing the traveling,” Levy said. “And so that was pitched to me and I said, ‘OK, all right. I get that.’”
In the eight-episode series, Levy travels to Japan, South Africa, Costa Rica, the Maldives, Portugal, Finland, Italy — and southern Utah, where, among other things, he stays at the Amangiri resort and takes a helicopter tour of the fabulous landscape despite his intense fear of heights.
“How you doing over there?” the pilot asks.
“Not bad,” Levy says. “I’ll be opening my eyes momentarily.”
As originally conceived, “The Reluctant Traveler” still takes Levy to ultra-posh hotels, like the Amangiri, which has been immortalized in many celebrity Instagram posts. But he gets away from the resorts and meets people who could never afford to stay where he stays.
In Utah, he went stargazing with Mylo Fowler, a member of the Navajo Nation. And then he spent time with Fowler’s family, an experience Levy said was one of his “most memorable” of the series.
(Apple TV+) Eugene Levy visits southern Utah in "The Reluctant Traveler."
“The Reluctant Traveler” introduces viewers to fascinating places and people, but what makes it work is Levy. His good-natured exasperation with what he’s subjected to on the trips and his quick wit are priceless.
“I mean, I was actually, truly reluctant in the very beginning,” he said, “until I realized that the show itself is about the reluctancy. So you can’t always say no to things. You have to try things. So the experience of this show — which has been so good for me, to be honest — is coming out of a comfort zone.”
And Brindley couldn’t be more pleased.
“We had no idea whether or not he was willing to sort of come on that journey with us, and to be game and up for that challenge,” he said. “And it was … both a surprise and a delight that he absolutely was, and throughout the series grew ever-increasingly trusting of us, and would do pretty much everything that we threw in front of him.
All eight episodes of “The Reluctant Traveler” are now streaming on Apple TV+.
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