Tom Hiddleston Stars in Everest Film Tenzing

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Tom Hiddleston remembers exactly how long it took him to commit to playing legendary mountaineer Edmund Hillary in Tenzing, a moving Australian-led film about the historic first ascent of Mount Everest in 1953. “Immediately,” he says. “Honestly.”

The British actor had just read what he calls a beautiful letter from Australian director Jennifer Peedom who, after making the 2015 documentary Sherpa, planned to put Hillary’s climbing companion Tenzing Norgay at the centre of a film that showed the fellowship and friendship between the two.

The letter included “a promise that it will be filmed and photographed on real mountains”, Hiddleston says. “We will go to Nepal. We will go to the Himalayas. We will be in real ice, real snow, real crevasses.”

A final flourish sealed the deal.

“In the last paragraph of her letter – we had never met before – she said, ‘Something tells me you’re the kind of person who’d be up for an adventure like this’. And my first question to her was, ‘How did you know?’ I was in. It was a very quick yes. ‘When do we start?’”

That rapid decision paid off when Tenzing became “one of the most extraordinary, unique opportunities of my life”, he says.

Given Hillary and Tenzing are inextricably connected in 20th century history, Hiddleston needed to bond with Genden Phuntsok, the actor who is sitting next to him on a Zoom call from the Toronto International Film Festival.

They are contrasting characters. Hiddleston, 45, is a fiercely articulate Eton, Cambridge and Royal Academy of Dramatic Art-educated star of the Marvel Cinematic Universe, as the mischievous Norse god Loki. He has shone on stage playing Shakespeare and has shot films with the likes of Steven Spielberg, Woody Allen, Jim Jarmusch, Guillermo del Toro and Taika Waititi. (He also happens to be an exceptional dancer, as shown in The Life of Chuck).

Phuntsok, 40, is a little-known Chinese actor of Tibetan descent who has only previously appeared in Tibetan-language films such as Pema Tseden’s Jinpa and Snow Leopard. Like the rest of the expedition cast, including Willem Dafoe as leader Colonel John Hunt, he had to learn the basics of mountain climbing – but he also had to master Sherpa and English language lessons.

Far from getting a written invitation from the director, Phuntsok had to make it through a casting process that included an initial video call with Peedom, then auditions two years later in Nepal and Australia. “I was happy but I also have big stress because he was such an amazing man,” he says. “How can I perform well? That was a big problem for me.”

On Zoom, it’s obvious there is a genuine connection between the two stars.

Hiddleston says that, aptly enough, they met for the first time under a sign saying “Tenzing-Hillary Airport” in Lukla, Nepal, early one morning before the shoot. After tea in a tea house, they set off on a five-day trek with two Sherpas: Phurba Tashi, who has summited Everest 21 times, and high-altitude doctor Nima Sherpa, who both appear in the film.

“We talked about the privilege and the honour … and responsibility of playing these two great men,” Hiddleston says. “They represent so much in terms of courage and belief and commitment and fellowship.”

Peedom, whose documentaries on life at the extremes of adventure include Solo (2008), Miracle on Everest (2008), Mountain (2017) and Deeper (2025), says the trek helped them connect. “There’s no better way to form a relationship, I think, than just walking and talking,” she says.

Determined and thoughtful, Peedom, 50, has been building towards making her first drama after the ABC series Race Around Oz introduced her to documentary-making in 2000. She lives in Sydney’s eastern suburbs with her stills photographer husband Mark Rogers and their children Tashi, 18, and Luca, 16.

Her long-term interest in the Sherpas began with a short documentary, Sherpas’ Burden, in 2004. She loved being in the Himalayas and found her body could handle conditions on climbs up to 8400 metres – just 450 metres below the Everest summit – as documentaries kept taking her back to the region.

“I was getting jobs early in my career as a camera operator on Everest expeditions and getting increasingly frustrated at the extent to which the Sherpas were written out of the narrative – literally left on the cutting room floor,” she says.

The idea for Tenzing came after the great man’s son, Norbu Tenzing, was given a standing ovation when Sherpa screened at the Sydney Film Festival in 2015. “Norbu and I both realised that there was a hunger for this story,” Peedom says. “The story that everyone knows is the ascent of Everest. But they don’t know everything that it took, all the obstacles that Tenzing had to overcome, just to get to the starting line.”

Peedom had intended to make Tenzing with Barack and Michelle Obama’s production company, Higher Ground, for Netflix. But a bidding war saw Apple TV acquire the worldwide rights, and it was made with See-Saw Films of The King’s Speech and Slow Horses fame, with a script by Luke Davies (Lion).

While the British wanted to be first to conquer Everest, Tenzing had a spiritual connection with the sacred mother goddess “Chomolungma”, the traditional Tibetan name for Everest . He first tried to join an expedition in 1933 before getting an opportunity in 1935, initially as a porter. While he built his experience over the next two decades, he still had to talk his way in to Hunt’s party for his 35th attempt.

Peedom shot the film in Nepal and New Zealand with none of the luxuries of a Marvel set. “[In] most situations with movies of this scale, there are people looking after those actors constantly,” she says. “I said to all of them, ‘You cannot have any of that. You’re going to be putting your own lunch in your backpack. You’re going to be putting on your own crampons and you’re going to be climbing. We need to be like, this is an expedition. Are we all OK with that?’”

Hiddleston loved the adventure of it. “We were surrounded by riggers and mountaineers and a stunt team that had absolutely everything conceivable to ensure our safety so that we could experience the environment … the depths of those crevasses, the vertiginous precipices of those summits, the snow, the ice, the wind, the cold,” he says. “The thrill of it was, for both of us, climbing a wall of ice to climb out of a crevasse, we had to really climb it and you feel your legs burning and your tank of energy depleting rapidly.”

Hiddleston’s research included speaking to Hillary’s son, Peter, and grandson, Alexander. “Knowing that you’re playing someone’s father, someone’s grandfather – it crystallises the responsibility in a very vivid and real way in the mind,” he says.

He also listened constantly to Hillary being interviewed on radio and TV and worked with dialect coach Jenny Kent to capture his period New Zealand accent. “Every dog walk, every car journey, every bicycle ride, I had Ed Hillary’s Desert Island Discs [a BBC radio show recorded in the 1970s] in my mind,” he says. “The great relief for me was that I got to New Zealand and some of the crew members said to me, ‘You sound just like my grandfather’, which, in terms of the time period, I think I placed it OK.”

Feeling the pressure of everything he had taken on – starring in a big movie, playing Tenzing, new languages – Phuntsok decided he had to experience the shoot as if it was really the 1950s. He turned off his mobile phone, read books rather than watched TV and turned down invitations to dinners and parties so he did not have “other messages” in his head. “I pushed myself to join Tenzing Norgay a hundred per cent,” he says.

His affecting performance anchors a film that is elevated by shooting in real mountains, and shows the deep spiritual connection between the Sherpas and the mountain. “We are the blood, the mountains are the bones,” Phuntsok says, quoting a line from the film. “So we should respect that and love them.”

Hiddleston, who is just as charming in the film, won’t quickly forget shooting it when he is back in the Marvel universe. “It was completely unprecedented, unrepeatable and unforgettable,” he says.

Tenzing opens in select cinemas and is on Apple TV from October 16.