What happened to Bear Grylls?

The name Bear Grylls instantly evokes certain images: rugged wilderness, daredevil stunts, and extremely risky, life-threatening situations.

The British survivalist made a name for himself initially through the TV show Man vs Wild, which was an international smash and cemented him in pop culture history.

But after a decade traipsing around the world, extracting himself from remote and dangerous locations, Bear Grylls seemed to slowly disappear from the spotlight.

Let’s take a look at what he’s been up to and how Grylls got to where he is today.

After more than a decade spent surviving and escaping life-threatening situations on TV, it was time for Grylls to take a little breather and spend time with his family.

In an interview with Louis Theroux, Grylls acknowledged that he’s lucky to be alive.

“There was a lot of danger in the early days [of filming Man vs Wild], we had so many narrow escapes,” he said. “I was bitten by snakes, caught in rapids, parachute failures, avalanches, you name it.”

Grylls added that there were 21 separate instances where he narrowly escaped death.

In the same interview, he explained that he started questioning why he kept putting his life in danger, especially now that he had three kids at home.

“The show’s got to push the boundaries, everything’s got to be bigger and better, and I’ve got three young boys who were super young at this stage – I was like, ‘why am I doing this?'” Grylls said.

“So I’ve got my inner voice going, ‘Don’t. Be smart, make your own calls’ and then I’ve got a winning format of a show, and that was a tension.”

Over his career, he has also broken a shoulder in Antarctica, been bitten by a scorpion in the Sahara desert, broken his nose in a karate fight, burnt his chest with hot pizza, and had a film camera smash into his leg while filming Man vs. Wild in the Canadian Rockies.

Really, it’s no surprise that he decided to cut back on adventures a little bit.

How did Bear Grylls break his back?

During his service in the British Army reserves in his early 20s, Grylls broke his back in a parachuting incident. While skydiving in Zambia in 1996, his parachute failed to open and he slammed into the ground, fracturing three vertebrae.

The accident and the year-long recovery process resulted in Grylls leaving the army. Despite recovering enough to continue his survival work, the Brit lives in constant pain due to his injuries.

In 2021, Grylls gave some insight into what it’s like living with the injury, and how he treats his pain.

“People sometimes ask me if my back ever hurts having broken it all those years ago in a parachuting accident. The answer is every day. And the treatment I get for it can be quite intense,” he wrote on Instagram.

Grylls added that he undergoes ice treatment every day to keep his body and mind strong.

What is Bear Grylls doing now?

Bear Grylls first came into the spotlight in the late 2000s, as the star of adventure survival show Man vs Wild. In the UK, the show was titled Born Survivor: Bear Grylls.

Each episode of the reality show saw Grylls and his camera crew deliberately stranded in a remote, wild location, showing his efforts to survive and find a way back to civilisation. Over the show’s seven seasons, Grylls travelled all over the world, to places including Iceland, Turkey, New Zealand, and Zambia.

Following the show’s conclusion in 2011, Grylls went on to star in a number of similar adventure shows. One particular favourite was Running Wild, where Grylls took celebrities on a two-day trip in the wilderness. Celebrities who took part in the show include Zac Efron, Ben Stiller, Channing Tatum, Kate Winslet, Kate Hudson, and Barack Obama.

Grylls still stars in occasional TV series and specials, all in the same vein of his previous work. He is also a very in-demand motivational speaker, travelling the world speaking at schools, churches, and business conferences, with his trademark brand of enthusiasm and excitement for life.

“I learned one critical lesson from Steve Irwin,” he told Outside Magazine, “which is that people love enthusiasm.”

The outdoorsman has one upcoming project that we can expect to see in the near future, an eight-part competition series titled I Survived Bear Grylls.

Is Bear Grylls still vegan?

Bear Grylls used to be an outspoken vegan – he even published a cookbook called Fuel for Life which attacked society’s “unnatural ways of breeding, keeping and killing animals”.

Grylls has since switched to a diet consisting entirely of red meat, eggs and organ meat.

The survivalist has also walked back all his past comments, saying that he’s a bit embarrassed about how gung-ho he was for veganism.

“I was vegan quite a few years ago – in fact, I wrote a vegan cookbook – and I feel a bit embarrassed because I really promoted that,” Grylls said in an interview with the UK Telegraph.

“I thought that was good for the environment and I thought it was good for my health.

“And through time and experience and knowledge and study, I realised I was wrong on both counts.”

Does Bear Grylls have a family?

Grylls now lives a slightly more laid-back lifestyle, living on a private island off the coast of Wales with his wife Shara and their three sons, Huckleberry, Jesse, and Marmaduke.