By Michaela Gordoni
Alex Honnold’s SKYSCRAPER LIVE reached 6.2 million views on Netflix on Jan. 24.
The livestream showed Honnold climb the Taipei 101 tower in Taiwan, one of the tallest buildings in the world.
The livestream ranked No. 3 on the Netflix English Language TV Top 10 for the week. Other top 10 English shows for the week were HIS & HERS, AGATHA CHRISTIE’S SEVEN DIALS, FINDING HER EDGE and FREE BERT.
The climb was originally scheduled for Jan. 23 but was postponed due to bad weather.
“Climbing is always at the mercy of nature,” Honnold told Variety. “Everything about climbing, you’re always at the whim of conditions. Is it too hot? Is it too cold? Is it windy, is it rainy?”
“My whole climbing life is always dictated by the weather, by nature. And so yesterday didn’t feel that different,” he said. “The only reason that it was at all stressful is because it’s supposed to be a live broadcast.”
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He thought about how big the production crew was and the impact it would have on them.
“The idea of pushing this a day, I was like, ‘Man, I don’t know how many crew people are here, but they’re a lot, and all their flights need to change today, and all their hotels change,’” he said.
Honnold broke the world record for the highest free solo climb of an urban structure in history, which had him pretty “psyched.”
His climb up the tower took slightly over 1.5 hours, and it was very windy.
“I don’t know if you can see, there were a few places where I would hug around to the left a little bit, because it basically was sheltering me from the wind a tiny bit more,” he said. “But then, when I climbed the corner itself, I would just be getting hammered. I was like, ‘Ah!’”
“And then the same when stepping onto the dragons,” he explained. “When I was on the left face of the dragon, I would be sheltered from the wind. But if I reached my hand around the dragon, it would basically be like, ‘Wow, it’s so windy!”’
Toward the top, he started to feel worn out.
“I wasn’t concerned that, ‘Oh, I’m so tired. I’m gonna fall off.’ But I was like, ‘OK, I’m feeling it!’”
Honnold listened to heavy metal as he climbed.
“It was mostly Tool,” he said. “…I’ve been training to it a bunch. Basically rock music that I’ve liked my whole life. Part of the appeal of music is that actually it helps me with pacing.”
“It gives you it gives you a sense of if you’re going fast or slow. But in this case, it all kept cutting out anyway, and I couldn’t really hear and I was kind of like, ‘whatever. I’m just doing my thing,’” he said.
What made the experience even better was a kiss from his wife, who was waiting for him at the top.
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