Catholic Actor David Henrie Talks About EWTN’s New Travel Show ‘Seeking Beauty’

By EWTN News

Catholic actor David Henrie has teamed up with EWTN Studios to create a new travel docuseries, Seeking Beauty, coming to EWTN+ Jan. 19. In this new, first-of-its-kind documentary series, Henrie, who is known for his role as Justin Russo on Disney’s Wizards of Waverly Place, explores culture, architecture, food, art, and music with the aims to point viewers to the beautiful — and ultimately to the divine.

EWTN News’s president and COO Montse Alvarado sat down with Henrie last fall to get a behind-the-scenes look at the new series, his own faith journey, and his joy in creating high-quality content that also elevates the beauty.  To watch the interview, click here.

Enjoy excerpts of the interview, edited for clarity and brevity:

On how ‘Seeking Beauty’ is a different kind of travel show…

Henrie: I love travel shows. I’m Italian, so I love the Stanley Tucci travel show, which is him eating food all over Italy. Anthony Bourdain might come to mind. There’s a lot of great travel shows out there. I was just like, “Man, I would love to do a travel show, but one where you flip the script, where it starts with what you don’t expect.” What you expect on an EWTN+ travel show is maybe an expert who’s telling you all about the aesthetics and beauty and the history and how everything works. ... We want an experience, right? So, we put the format on its head. We have someone who’s not an expert, which is me, inviting the audience to go on a journey with me and have fun. So we go all over Italy, and we meet with the experts, and I’m sitting down asking questions that maybe you at home would want to ask if you were sitting in front of this person. And as I’m blown away, hopefully you’ll be blown away, too, because we had some beautiful experiences. And the common theme was always that beauty has a capital B, that beauty is ultimately the language of the divine and a reflection of God.

On how to stay fired up about faith…

Henrie: I always had a desire for excellence and for greatness. Before I was Catholic, though, it just didn’t have a path. It didn’t have direction. It was just a spread, and things would fizzle out, and my end was very material.

Once I became Catholic, suddenly, there’s direction.

It’s going to be hard. You might fall, you can get back up, but suddenly there’s direction. So these desires that I naturally had to want to be excellent in my life suddenly had a way to articulate and had a path. That excitement is what keeps me going.

It comes with structure, like daily meditation, daily Rosary. If you can get to daily Mass, great. It’s a lot harder when you have three little rug rats running around. But my wife’s great about taking the kids. Because I consider myself a convert, I just fell in love with all the elements the Church has to feed us. There are so many elements to feed us: all the sacraments, the different forms of grace. We have so many [spiritual] “weapons” at our disposal that, to me, I’m just like, if I’m not doing stuff every day, I’m not sharpening my soul, and I’m not growing.

The Church is like an elevator. You’re either going up or down. It’s exciting to me, and it’s a wonderful challenge to be headed on this path.

On his favorite spiritual guides…

Henrie: To me, the Carmelite spirituality I absolutely love. My daily meditation for many years has been Divine Intimacy, which is a wonderful book of Carmelite spirituality and Carmelite saints that goes along with the liturgical year. I love that. When I first converted, St. Teresa of Avila was one of the first books that I read, Way of Perfection; Interior Castle. I love her way of looking at things, and, obviously, St. John of the Cross. Carmelite spirituality is most on my heart.

On how to accept that God loves you…

Henrie: A lot of times people that don’t accept God — and I certainly related to this — there’s a problem in how you were raised or in the dynamic of the household. Do you associate one of your parents’ bad attributes with God? I think once you realize that God is the best in your parents and none of the worst, and he’s the best times a thousand, that he’s his own being who has that relationship with you, that can jump those barriers that you have that might prevent that love. It just takes a surrender. It takes a complete surrender. I mean, I changed my life when that happened.

Watch Seeking Beauty on EWTN+, an on-demand digital platform that allows you to watch, listen to, and pray with a vast library of EWTN content across multiple devices when you want and where you want. EWTN+ is currently available free on RokuTV and will launch on EWTN.com, AppleTV, AmazonFireTV, and GoogleTV in 2026.