Every Everest story has a man with a clipboard. On the 1953 British expedition, that man was Colonel John Hunt, the soldier who drew up the timetables, counted the oxygen cylinders and decided who would make the final push to the top. History knighted him within weeks, without looking at what he also got wrong.
In Apple TV’s Tenzing, Jennifer Peedom’s retelling of the first ascent of Everest with Tenzing Norgay at its centre, Hunt is played by Willem Dafoe. He is neither villain nor hero, but a man who has to unlearn the assumptions he arrived with.
“He was a very courageous man, but he didn’t always get credit for his courage,” Dafoe said during a roundtable with a small group of journalists from around the world. “He’s remembered as a military man that headed the expedition, and he made some mistakes.”
The film is coming to Apple TV on October 16 and it follows Tenzing (Genden Phuntsok) from his boyhood on the Tibetan Plateau in 1924, herding yaks beneath the mountain he knows as Chomolungma, Mother Goddess of the World, to the morning of May 29, 1953, when he and New Zealander Edmund Hillary (Tom Hiddleston) became the first two people known to stand on its summit. With Himalayan Club secretary Jill Henderson (Caitríona Balfe), Tenzing persuades Hunt that he belongs on the climbing team, not merely in its service.
Playing a man on the record
Hunt left behind a long paper trail. Dafoe has played real people before, Vincent van Gogh in At Eternity’s Gate among them. When t2 asked how he approaches such a figure, and whether he has a method, he said the starting point is a sense of obligation. “Well, you have a different responsibility. It depends on what kind of film it is,” he said. “But having read his memoir and going into a lot of research about him, I thought he was a very compassionate man, and it was just a case of he felt like the only way they could summit was with excellent discipline, a kind of military style of discipline, logistics, good planning, and keeping a timetable.”
The trouble, as Dafoe sees it, is that Hunt was “probably more a military man than a mountaineer, and nature throws him lots of curveballs. So he adjusts, but the beauty in the story is, of course, he adjusts and rises to the occasion, and not only works to have the summit accomplished, but also has a shift of his understanding of the people in the expedition and their contribution.”
That shift is at the heart of Dafoe’s performance. Hunt arrives as the embodiment of order, a man who believes past expeditions failed because nobody sweated the detail, and Dafoe plays that rigidity without mocking it.
The Raj in Hunt’s bones
There is an Indian thread to Hunt’s story. He was born in Simla in 1910, and Dafoe believes that upbringing shaped him. “He was born in India during the Raj, and he was used to a kind of colonial mentality. So sometimes he did have some of the accepted opinions of the time, so he really learned much in the expedition,” Dafoe said.
He also argued that Hunt, for all his authority, was an outsider of a kind, much like Tenzing, who was not born Sherpa, and Hillary, a New Zealander on a British team. “Even from the beginning, he was not the natural candidate to lead this expedition, so like Tenzing, like Hillary, he had many personal obstacles to overcome. He couldn’t show them because he’s in a leadership position, but through the research, I found in his personal memoir, it was very difficult and very trying for him.”
The film does not let Hunt off lightly. He first sends two British climbers for the summit, and only when they turn back does he hand the chance to Tenzing and Hillary. “He doesn’t learn right away because after the first team fails, he goes with another British team, basically,” Dafoe said. “But then his only chance left is Tenzing and Hillary, and he goes with that. So he really surrenders to a situation that has been handed to him, and I think he has the recognition of, you know... it’s a humbling moment for him, and it’s a moment of generosity for him.”
That arc closes in one of the film’s quietest scenes. Before the final attempt, Hunt blesses Tenzing in the Sherpa language. “That gesture that he makes of giving a blessing to Tenzing in a language that is not his own is the completion of that progression,” he said. “It shows he’s shifted. He’s shifted from seeing Tenzing as someone that’s going to serve, is going to be helpful, but not drive the expedition. And he doesn’t even consider his skill or his merit because he’s kept him at a certain level in the expedition. So this shows an acceptance, an appreciation, and also something of an admission that he was wrong, that he was wrong not to consider him more.”
The epilogue of history is less tidy. Hunt and Hillary were knighted in 1953; Tenzing, not a British subject, received the George Medal. Hunt went on to become a life peer and used proceeds from his book, The Ascent of Everest, to help set up the Mount Everest Foundation, which still funds expeditions.
A director who knows the mountain
Dafoe’s history with Peedom predates Tenzing. He narrated two of her documentaries, Mountain and River, and told her while the script was taking shape that he would take a role if the right one existed. Asked how he had seen her grow as a director, and what made this collaboration different from his work with some of the biggest names in cinema, he described two entirely different jobs.
“With the documentary, my job is, I say it’s different. It’s limited because I’m doing narration. Now it was poetic language, so it was important to find the tone and the timing,” he said. “You’ve got text, a very beautiful text by Robert Macfarlane. You’ve got image and you’ve got music. That’s what you’re dealing with, and I got to know her through working on that, and so this is a different experience. The logistics, the amount of people, the fact that we’re shooting on really extreme locations, it’s completely different.”
What did not change was his faith in her. “I knew that she was the right person to tell this story, this passion project, because she knew the Sherpa community, she knew the Himalayas. She was a mountain person. And she had decided very early on that she wanted to put Tenzing Norgay at the centre, which is not the way that the story is usually told.”
Tenzing, Peedom’s first scripted feature, was made with the involvement of the Norgay family — Tenzing’s son Norbu Tenzing is an executive producer.
What drew Dafoe in first was not Hunt but the way the film would be made. The Everest sequences were shot in the depths of winter in New Zealand’s Southern Alps, including Aoraki Mount Cook, with Nepal standing in for Tenzing’s early life.
“The idea that we weren’t going to use green screen, that we were going to create this parallel experience of... we were going to climb a mountain,” he said. “It wouldn’t be all CGI-ed out and special effects. We were going to physically have our hands on something.”
Hunt is his first mountaineer, though he has worked in extreme cold before, in the Canadian Rockies for Togo. The mountains still made their point. “Sometimes we’d be shooting one place, and you’d hear this terrible roar, and you’d look off, and a whole side of the mountain would just go tumbling,” he said. “You’re reminded we’re a film company. We have all kinds of protections that they didn’t have. So it’s sobering.”
Asked what his own Everest might be, Dafoe offered no summit. “I want to learn how to be flexible, unflappable, and ready for anything,” he said. And when it comes to nature: “I don’t think about conquering anything. I think about disappearing into it.”
It is, fittingly, closer to Tenzing’s Chomolungma than to Hunt’s Everest. Dafoe admits as much. “I think even before the movie, I was more down with Tenzing Norgay than I was with Hunt.”