80s heart-throb turned travel scribe Andrew McCarthy says Toronto no longer dull

TORONTO – As an ’80s heart-throb turned award-winning travel writer, Andrew McCarthy has scaled Mount Kilimanjaro, ventured down the Amazon on a riverboat and strapped into a sled to rocket down the Iditarod Trail in Alaska.

The former Brat Pack member has spent the past few weeks in Hamilton and Toronto to film a movie, not in his capacity as editor-at-large for National Geographic Traveler. But he’s taken in the sights regardless as he’s spent his evenings in Toronto, attending a Blue Jays game at the Rogers Centre, viewing the Picasso Exhibit at the Art Gallery of Ontario and watching a François Truffaut film at the TIFF Bell Lightbox.

So, what does the travel guru make of Canada’s biggest city?

“Toronto’s really grown up. It’s really come into its own,” said the 49-year-old star of “Weekend at Bernie’s” and “St. Elmo’s Fire,” noting that his opinion has changed drastically since he first visited Toronto in 1982, when he was doing reshoots for a film.

“I’ve seen Toronto grow up with me. The rap on Toronto from us snobby Americans was that it was sort of very nice, but dull.

“And that’s just certainly not the case (anymore). Toronto has a real vibrant sort of confidence now that it never had, for years. But in the last 10 years maybe, it’s really its own thing. It’s really nice. So I like coming here a lot.”

Still, McCarthy — who is shooting the CTV holiday movie “Christmas Dance” while in town — likely won’t be issuing any travel pieces on his visit.

He’s perhaps just too busy. In addition to his on-screen roles, he’s found success as a TV director helming episodes of “Gossip Girl” and “White Collar.” He’s also planning more ambitious sojourns, to India and Alaska (as well as a more low-key camping trip with his kids). Oh, and he’ll publish his first book, “The Longest Way Home: One Man’s Quest for the Courage to Settle Down,” on Sept. 18.

The travel memoir found McCarthy using his soul-searching voyages to discover why he couldn’t commit to his fiancee Dolores Rice (spoiler alert: they married in 2011). While documenting his far-flung adventures and exploring his career, McCarthy also probes intensely personal elements of his life, looking at his relationship with his father, the cost of his early success and the common threads in his relationships with women.

“I had an issue — I was engaged to a woman for years and yet I couldn’t get married. And what was holding me back? So I used the outward journeys in the book to go on my personal inward journey,” said McCarthy, whose writing has appeared in the New York Times, the Atlantic and Men’s Journal.

That’s a slightly odd position to be in for a former pop-culture idol who once tried to guard his private life with the ferocity of the Secret Service.

“When I started, a million years ago, you would never talk about your personal life — people were always prying and you were viciously trying to protect it,” he said.

“Now the whole world is turned upside-down in that way. But the book turned out to be much more personal than I anticipated at the beginning.”

Surprisingly, McCarthy says he’s mainly able to travel incognito despite his famous face.

But sometimes, his celebrity is useful.

“It just opens doors in a way, because I’m naturally slightly reticent at entering situations, but then all of a sudden it’s: ‘Hey! “Weekend at Bernie’s!”‘ And suddenly the ice is broken,” he said with a laugh.

“Once people recognize you, they think they know you in a certain way because there’s that level of familiarity with you, so there’s a level of intimacy established right away that’s sort of artificial and yet it allows easy access to people in their lives. So it’s very helpful in that way.”

Of course, the recent trend in Hollywood has been to remake any remotely successful project from the Reagan era, and some of those hits for which McCarthy still gets recognized — a cluster that also includes “Pretty in Pink” and “Mannequin” — could be ripe for revisiting.

McCarthy wouldn’t mind, but don’t expect to spot him at the cinema.

“I can’t imagine they’d want to,” he said. “Although I have to say, I saw ‘(The Amazing) Spider-Man’ with my son a couple weeks ago. It was fun, it was good. But I was like: ‘Didn’t I just see this exact movie?’

“So I thought it was very good but I didn’t know what the point of it was. I think there are other stories we could tell — other than the guy who falls in love with a mannequin. Do we really need to see that again? I don’t know, maybe. But I don’t.”