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Alex Honnold near the Taipei 101 building
NEED TO KNOW
- Alex Honnold will be scaling the 101-story Taipei 101 skyscraper live, on Netflix, on Friday
- Though the dad of two won’t be roped or harnessed to the building there will be precautions taken during the streaming special
- “Every scenario has been mapped out, as you might expect,” one producer said. “The main focus has been on keeping Alex safe”
Alex Honnold will be scaling the 101-story Taipei 101 skyscraper live, on Netflix, on Friday (East Coast time) — without ropes or harnesses or other aids.
It’s called free solo climbing and it’s something Honnold, a 40-year-old dad of two, has been doing for years, even being featured in the Oscar-winning Free Solo documentary in 2018.
He’s become very famous in his sport despite (or because of) the danger he has long overcome through athleticism, strength and, as he’ll admit, a not insignificant amount of courage.
And though Honnold, won’t be roped or harnessed to the building he’s climbing, which juts nearly a third of a mile into the air, PEOPLE understands that there will be precautions taken during the Skyscraper Live special, including what is being referred to as standard live-TV production safety protocols.
A spokeswoman for Netflix did not respond to follow-up questions about specific measures taken.
But producers who spoke with Variety said they are keeping an eye both on the weather in Taiwan’s capital — delays have been planned for — and on Honnold’s mind-set.
“There’s a two-tick system,” said Grant Mansfield with Plimsoll Productions. “First and foremost, he [Honnold] has to feel good about it. And we’ve said to him repeatedly, if you’re not feeling it, despite the fact it’s a live broadcast, and there’s a bunch of TV people hanging around, you are under no pressure to do this climb.”
“And the second tick is, if we get in a situation where he’s saying, ‘Yeah, I’m going for it,’ but [if] there are things that bothering us, we have the right to say ‘no,’ “ Mansfield continued. “He won’t be on that building unless we’re all comfortable. But there’s been a huge amount of planning for this. He said he’s the fittest he’s ever been. He’s really been training for this. We’re feeling good about it at this stage.”
In the event, say, of exhaustion then “we can get him off …. But Alex really knows what he’s doing. He’s an extraordinary kind of athlete,” Mansfield said.
“Every scenario has been mapped out, as you might expect,” Mansfield said. “The main focus has been on keeping Alex safe.”
Among the potential scenarios, however unlikely, is the risk of injury or worse — death.
“It’s obviously a conversation that everybody has,” Netflix executive Jeff Gaspin told Variety. “You can imagine what we’ll do. It’s nothing momentous. We’ll cut away. We have a 10-second delay. Nobody expects or wants to see anything like that to happen. But we will cut away, and it’s as simple as that.”
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Corey Rich for Netflix
Alex Honnold
Honnold, who has wanted to scale Taipei 101 for more than a decade, has said that when he starts his climb, there will be some butterflies in his stomach to bat away
“I’m sure I’ll feel a little nervous at the bottom, just because it’s something totally new and I don’t know how it’s going to feel,” he recently told Netflix’s Tudum. “I’ve spent 30 years climbing rock faces; this is going to be my first big handmade structure, so I’m sure it’ll feel a little different.”
Honnold went on to add: “My life is on the line — I don’t really care who’s watching. I care about doing what I’m doing and doing it well.”
Yes, he told CNN in an interview ahead of his climb: “If something happens, I would die — though actually, on this particular building, that's not even totally true"
“There are balconies every few floors,” he went on to say. “The geometry of the building, the shape of the building is such that you actually could fall in tons of places and not actually die, which makes it in some ways safer than a lot of rock-climbing objectives.”
Speaking with Tudum, Honnold said, “I’m very confident that I can climb the building, which is why I’m doing this, but I want to have a good time, I want to smile and enjoy myself, I want to have a good experience.”
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He likened the tiered middle section to the Taipei 101’s architecture to a series of stacked “bamboo boxes.”
Getting up those, he said, will likely be “the hardest part.”
“Each one is eight floors, so it represents 64 floors in the middle of the building, and they’re all the same,” he told Tudum.
“They overhang, I don’t know, 10 or 15 degrees — it’s kind of steep — and then there’s a balcony every eight floors. In a lot of ways, it actually feels like a climbing pitch, which is the way climbers differentiate segments of a climb,” he explained, adding, “This means you do quite a hard effort for almost 100 feet and then there’s a balcony, and then you do hard effort for 100 feet and there’s a balcony.”
“The boxes are definitely the most physically demanding part,” he said.
But facing his fear — and any complications as he climbs hand over foot over hand over foot — is nothing new.
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Paul Archuleta/Getty for Film Independent
From left Alex Honnold and wife Sanni McCandless in 2018
“With soloing, if something happens, once you’ve registered that it’s happened, it’s already happened — so it’s done and you’re fine, you didn’t fall off,” he told Tudum. “So technically, by the time you realize what’s happening, you’re already good, and what you have to do is calm yourself back down and then return to what you’re doing, which is obviously easier said than done.”
As for people watching along at home, he advised, “I think the untrained viewer should appreciate the effort and practice and training that goes into it. Basically, that there’s a plan and I’m executing the plan, and it’s not just willy-nilly and just walk up and try my best.”
Producers told Variety that Honnold plans to climb to the very tip-top of the skyscraper. He might even “bat hang” over what they’re calling the “crown.”
And after?
“I’ll take the elevator down, I’ll see my wife [Sanni McCandless], we’ll be psyched,” Honnold told Tudum. “We’ll eat at the buffet that night — it’s a really nice buffet — it’ll be great, and that will be the day.”
Skyscraper Live airs on Friday, Jan. 23, at 8 p.m. ET/5 p.m. PT on Netflix.
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