“I wouldn’t recommend anyone attempt Everest”: Tenzing director Jennifer Peedom on Everest queues, reclaiming lost narratives and dropping Loki into a crevasse

Tenzing foregrounds the most famous sherpa in the world in his own story for the first time. He was, director Jennifer Peedom tells us, the classic underdog

Tom Hiddleston and Genden Phuntsok stand side by side in mountaineering clothes, surrounded by snow and steep, ice-covered peaks. They portray Edmund Hillary and Tenzing Norgay in Tenzing.

Published: October 17, 2026 at 12:01 AM

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Tenzing Norgay was half of the duo who made it to ‘the roof of the world’ when he completed a historic first ascent of Mount Everest alongside Edmund Hillary in 1953 – and by all accounts when they stepped onto the summit, they did so together. But when the accolades were handed out, you might think he was the lesser party.

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New Zealander Hillary received a knighthood; so too did the expedition’s leader, British Army officer John Hunt. But Tenzing, a man who not only made it to the summit but was the expedition’s sirdar (head sherpa) – responsible for all the logistics on the mountain that made the ascent possible – was only offered the George Medal, a civilian honour conceived to mark acts of heroism during the Blitz.

The popular narrative that followed in the ensuing decades was that Hillary had summited Everest (referred to increasingly by one of its original names, Chomolungma) and that Tenzing was there. It’s one of the many misconceptions surrounding the man that director Jennifer Peedom seems to hope to dispel in her first dramatic feature Tenzing.

Peedom is no stranger to the Himalayas, having started as a camera operator on Himalayan expeditions before making films of her own – fans of mountain movies may well remember her 2015 film Sherpa, which documented the real stories from the Sherpa community in the aftermath of a 2014 avalanche on the Khumbu Icefall that caused a number of fatalities. Just as Sherpa was, Tenzing is thoughtful and reflective, aiming to foreground Norgay in his own story for the first time.

Four actors in heavy expedition clothing stand together on a snowy mountainside; Willem Dafoe is second from the right. He plays John Hunt, leader of the 1953 British Everest expedition.

Willem Dafoe (second from right) portrays John Hunt, leader of the 1953 British Everest expedition. A senior army officer, Hunt was knighted after Hillary and Norgay’s successful ascent | Credit: Courtesy of Apple

Tom Hiddleston and Willem Dafoe are the biggest names in the cast, taking on the roles of Hillary and Hunt, but its star is undoubtedly Genden Phuntsok – a Chinese actor of Tibetan descent – as Norgay.

His casting reflects another lesser-known fact – the most famous sherpa in the world was not an ethnic Sherpa, but the son of a Tibetan yak herder who came to Nepal and later moved to Darjeeling seeking work among the expeditions. ‘Tenzing Norgay’ wasn’t even the name he was born with; that was the one given to him later.

Peedom’s Tenzing is the story of how a young boy looked up at the mountain revered as Chomolungma – the mother goddess – and dreamed of what it would mean to stand on what is quite literally hallowed ground.

We caught up with the director for an exclusive interview after the film’s London premiere to find out more.

The 1953 ascent of Everest is such a well-known narrative, but often one dominated by the idea of heroic European conquest, and I wondered what you want to reveal about this story by focusing it through Tenzing’s perspective?

Jennifer Peedom: I spent a lot of my early career working as a camera operator and a documentary filmmaker in the Himalayas, and for me what was always interesting and part of the attraction of the place was the culture and the Sherpa people.

One of my earliest films about the Sherpas [Sherpa, 2015] was because I was really interested in this idea that mountaineering for them is a job, but Chomolungma is a deity that they worship, and that the landscape means something spiritual and very different to what it means to western climbers who come and climb the mountain. I wanted audiences to see that point of view.

Director Jennifer Peedom stands outdoors on a green mountainside, wearing a cap and headset, with other people visible behind her. She is on location during the filming of Tenzing.

Director Jennifer Peedom on the set of Tenzing. The filmmaker’s award-winning 2015 documentary Sherpa followed Himalayan climbing guides in the aftermath of a deadly avalanche | Credit: Courtesy of Apple

I’ve heard you say of Sherpa that you “weren’t making a climbing film, you were making a story about a people”. Tenzing feels like it’s doing a bit of both?

JP: The reason I wanted to make this film about Tenzing was first to redress that historical balance, because he’d never really been at the centre. He was more of a supporting character in the story.

But it was also [about] everything that Tenzing had been through in his life just to get to the starting line of Everest, let alone ascend the mountain. That story to me was fascinating – the sheer number of obstacles he had to overcome just to get to that place.

He’d been through so much in his life. He’d been exiled from Tibet to Nepal as a young boy. His family had had to leave [him] while they were looking for work just to survive. He was an outsider in that community – the classic underdog in many ways. He was underestimated his entire life.

It was about that as much as anything else, about showing the family the cultural sacrifices that he had to make along the way to fulfil this childhood dream.

I was really taken with the character that Caitríona Balfe plays, Jill Henderson. She is such a big part of the British mountaineering story overall in Nepal, but also a big part of Tenzing’s story as well.

JP: It was really she that convinced him to take on the [British 1953] expedition. He genuinely had hesitations. He had an extreme loyalty to the Swiss, who he’d climbed with the year before, and they had tried and failed. He was depleted. He was exhausted. He’d promised his family he wasn’t going to go back again, and then this invitation came.

Caitríona Balfe stands in a warmly lit, period-furnished office, wearing a striped blouse and high-waisted trousers. She plays Jill Henderson, who helped persuade Norgay to join the 1953 expedition.

Irish star Caitríona Balfe portrays Jill Henderson, who served as honorary secretary of the Himalayan Club in Darjeeling, India. Henderson helped persuade Tenzing Norgay to join the 1953 Everest expedition | Credit: Courtesy of Apple

It was Henderson and Raymond Lambert [the Swiss mountaineer with whom Tenzing had climbed to within 237 metres of the summit in 1952] who colluded to convince Tenzing to go, because they knew that this was probably going to be the one. They knew that this was his moment and that he deserved it more than anyone else.

Lambert wrote him a letter. Henderson campaigned to him endlessly until he eventually agreed to go. And I just felt like, what an amazing woman, who had such a remarkable part in history that had also never been talked about in the traditional narratives of the telling of Everest, yet she played such a significant role.

There’s an ongoing conversation right now as to the state of climbing on Mount Everest, and we’ve all seen these mind-boggling photos of the queues. What are your thoughts on the responsibilities we have as storytellers when we’re discussing a mountain that represents a peak of human endeavour, but also is a place of spirituality?

JP: For whatever reason, Everest has become this symbol of human achievement, and it’s become a bucket list ambition. It attracts people, and no matter what happens on Everest, the worse the disasters, the more people seem to come the next year to test themselves. And I think that says something about western culture in some ways, and I find it interesting, though I don’t really understand it myself.

It’s like a proving ground. And I would suggest that there are other ways to do that than to come to Everest and add to the traffic jam that is that mountain these days. I would not recommend anyone attempt to go there and climb, really, because it is dangerous due to the crowds. There are better ways to achieve a dream than standing in a line to put your foot on the summit of the highest mountain in the world.

That difficulty of climbing a mountain like Everest was really evident in Tenzing: the laboured breathing and heavy steps were so evocative. How important was it to give a sense that this isn’t a walk in the park?

JP: Really important, and it’s a very difficult thing to portray in cinema because it’s a feeling. Someone described it to me once as running on a treadmill and breathing through a straw. You just can’t get enough oxygen into your lungs, and so your legs are burning. You’re sort of taking a step and then having about three breaths and then finding the strength to take another step.

It’s enormously challenging and the higher you get, the worse that gets. Trying to portray that is difficult, but I’m glad you picked up on the breath. We spent a lot of time with sound design working with breath because that’s the thing keeping you alive.

A still from Tenzing. The technical climbing scenes were filmed on real crevasses, icefalls and ridges in New Zealand’s Southern Alps, giving the actors a direct experience of the demanding terrain | Credit: Courtesy of Apple

A still from Tenzing. The technical climbing scenes were filmed on real crevasses, icefalls and ridges in New Zealand’s Southern Alps, giving the actors a direct experience of the demanding terrain | Credit: Courtesy of Apple

On the spirituality point, there was one scene I wanted to ask you about: at one of the high camps there’s a mutiny among the Sherpas that Tenzing resolves, and it concludes with a blessing using rice. I wonder if you can tell us what we’re seeing there, and more broadly how you brought the authenticity of Sherpa culture into the movie?

JP: That really came from my own experiences with Sherpas on mountains and hearing their stories. That scene where they say [of Chomolungma] that they’re too frightened to go further because now that we’re up at the South Col, we’re literally stabbing our spikes into her shoulders? They were conversations that I’d heard in camps on Everest.

And one of the Sherpas in that scene – his name is Balu – was actually our expedition doctor who played that role. He also said, “Jen, these are conversations I had with Sherpas like one year ago on Everest”. So it was about bringing all of those experiences that I’d had in conversations with Sherpas over many years about what the mountain means to them, and trying to help a broader audience understand that, to them, it is a living embodiment of a deity, of a goddess.

Genden Phuntsok wears a yellow down jacket, wool cap and climbing goggles, with a rope over his shoulder and a snowy mountainside behind him. He portrays Tenzing Norgay.

Genden Phuntsok as Tenzing Norgay. As the expedition’s sirdar (head sherpa), Norgay had to organise supplies while dealing with the strain of the climb himself – a “double job”, says Jennifer Peedom | Credit: Courtesy of Apple

For them, there is a quite literal feeling that the landscape is inseparable from the spirituality within it. It was really important to me to portray that perspective because the film is really from Tenzing’s point of view. I know he had a conversation like that with the Sherpas on that Everest expedition.

He had the challenge of not only climbing the mountain himself, but he was leading the Sherpa team and was responsible for getting all of the supplies. So he had this kind of double job that he had to do, and he was under enormous pressure. And he was juggling the demands of two very different competing groups. And the Sherpas did fear the unknown. Tenzing was unique in the sense that he wanted to climb, but he also chose to see the goddess not as something to be feared, but to be revered, and he was unusual in that, and he was a pioneer in that way.

There is another way to see this. We don’t need to fear her. If we ask for her permission, ask for her blessing, she will grant us passage, she will keep us safe. And that’s what that scene is about. They’re throwing rice, which is an offering to Chomolungma. And I think as you see in the film, it gave the Sherpas a sense of peace that it was okay, and of course it was. There were no accidents on that expedition. There were no deaths. It was remarkable.

It’s a very beautiful scene. I know you know Sherpa culture well from your previous works, including your 2015 documentary Sherpa. How much did your documentarian background inform how you approached Tenzing?

JP: You probably can tell from the film that we were shooting on real mountains in real landscapes. And I guess for me, that was what I knew. It seemed insane to do it any other way because part of the story is the landscape, and so to fake that didn’t make any sense to me.

I wanted the audience, but also the actors, to experience those landscapes and those cultures, and I wanted to show that when you shoot in those communities, you’re shooting with people who live in those communities, and that brings this beautiful level of authenticity.

And then the actors themselves cannot help but be affected by that. You know, many of them have talked about the fact that they didn’t really need to do a lot of acting in these scenes because when Tom Hiddleston is down that crevasse climbing out of it, he’s really down a crevasse climbing out of it. It was like, “Okay, Tom, start climbing.” He’s really doing it. That was the point.

I wanted to ask you about that specific moment, where Tom falls into that crevasse. How does that actually happen?

JP: It was a trapdoor that we had set up, so when he landed in that spot, the trapdoor got pulled and he had the safety rope. When he’s hanging in the crevasse, that is just the main safety rope – so the picture rope became the safety rope, and we did a lot of work to make sure that we could make the ropes look period appropriate, but they’re also proper safety ropes. That’s how we did it. He just did it for real.

Tom Hiddleston sits on the ground outdoors, one knee raised, with a bag beside him. He plays Edmund Hillary.

Tom Hiddleston as New Zealand-born mountaineer Edmund Hillary. The Loki star performed a daring stunt in which Hillary falls into a crevasse, with a trapdoor and safety rope used to stage the fall | Credit: Courtesy of Apple

But you built a trapdoor on a Nepalese mountain?

JP: That’s in New Zealand. All of the technical climbing with the actors from Everest Base Camp up was in New Zealand [Ed’s note: everything below Base Camp was filmed in Nepal]. And those mountains really are as big from bottom to top as the Himalayas. They just start at almost sea level in the Southern Alps.

All of the actual aerials of Everest itself, [they’re] the real mountain, the real [Khumbu] icefall. But then we would shoot the specific scenes, in real crevasses and icefalls and ridges and faces in New Zealand. And the summit of Everest, we shot on the summit of one of the highest mountains in New Zealand. And you can see the awe and the emotion on the actors’ faces, because they’re standing on one of the highest mountains in New Zealand looking down at the world below them.

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Tenzing is streaming on Apple TV from 16 October and is being shown in select cinemas now

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