Tom Hiddleston’s new Apple TV movie Tenzing sees him scaling Mount Everest as one half of the first duo to ever reach the summit, Edmund Hillary. And the Loki actor says it was such a physical feat to prepare for that involved him and his co-star Genden Phuntsok, who plays the titular Tenzing Norgay, training how to scale real mountains.
When asked by GamesRadar+ how that process compared to keeping Avengers: Doomsday secrets, Hiddleston laughs as he admits: “Well, I’ve been keeping my Marvel secrets close to my chest for a while now, so that muscle is practiced. This was all new for me.”
He says he wanted to do as much as he could of the real thing. “I thought, ‘Okay, I’ve got to get fit and strong,’ and so I made sure to try and build a true fitness. I did lots of running before I started and strength and conditioning work, and then when I got to the mountains, lots of time with the mountain team and with the stunt team, learning how to do the things that Hillary knew how to do.”
The process even involved Hiddleston and Phuntsok going on a climb towards Everest base camp. “We wanted mountaineers to watch this film and go, ‘Yeah, okay, they know what they’re doing,'” he explains.
For Phuntsok, this came with different challenges. “I’m living in high plateau, so this is not really hard for me, but of course compared with a really professional mountaineer, of course, it’s really challenging for me,” he tells us. “Especially, we have to learn and train how to climb ice, snow, and rock, and everything is new knowledge for me.”
One particular sequence in the movie featured Tenzing having to scale a 30-foot icy crevasse, which the pair revealed was enacted for real when filming. “This is one of the first things we did in the mountains,” Hiddleston explains. “They said, ‘Genden, it’s time to go into the crevasse and climb out the other side,’ and the rest of us simply watched Genden climb a wall of ice.”
Phuntsok says halfway through he looked back at the depth and thought, “Oh my God, I don’t believe this.” He adds: “I can imagine at that time Tenzing Norgay and Edmund Hillary and the team must have beat so many things like this.”
Elsewhere, in our interview, Hiddleston also told us how filming the movie was “the most unforgettable adventure of my life.”
Tenzing is available in select theaters and to stream on Apple TV now. For more, check out our guide to the best Apple TV movies to watch now.