{"id":18017,"date":"2026-10-09T10:22:21","date_gmt":"2026-10-09T10:22:21","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/wildgreenquest.com\/?p=18017"},"modified":"2026-10-09T10:22:21","modified_gmt":"2026-10-09T10:22:21","slug":"meet-the-breakout-star-of-the-new-everest-film","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/wildgreenquest.com\/?p=18017","title":{"rendered":"Meet the Breakout Star of the New Everest Film"},"content":{"rendered":"


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Published October 9, 2026 03:59AM<\/p>\n<\/div>\n

Genden Phuntsok had been walking for a full day.<\/p>\n

He was headed down to Lukla, Nepal, and the Tenzing-Hillary Airport, a narrow strip of asphalt at 9,300 feet where sticking the landing can feel like a life-or-death proposition. It was time to meet his co-star. Tom Hiddleston was arriving by helicopter. Genden and his host, the Sherpa mountaineer Phurba Tashi, had hiked down from the village of Khumjung to collect him. Genden had never met a Hollywood movie star. He knew exactly who was stepping off that helicopter.<\/p>\n

He walked up, put out his hand, and said: \u201cHey, Hillary.\u201d<\/p>\n

Hiddleston shook it and said: \u201cHey, Tenzing.\u201d<\/p>\n

\u201cFrom that moment,\u201d Phuntsok told me, \u201cwe could feel we were the roles.\u201d They spent the next two days walking back up to Khumjung, running dialogue and reflecting on the history of the trail \u2014the actual approach the men they were about to play once used. This road was really bad back then,<\/i> they\u2019d say to each other. Not like this. How hard it was for them.<\/i><\/p>\n

Jennifer Peedom\u2019s Tenzing<\/em>, in theaters October 9 and on Apple TV October 16, is a rare thing: a movie about the first ascent of Everest in which Edmund Hillary is the supporting role.<\/p>\n

Tom Hiddleston and Genden Phuntsok in \u201cTenzing.\u201d<\/span> (Photo: Apple TV)<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n

Hillary was the Auckland beekeeper who stood on the summit with Tenzing Norgay on May 29, 1953. He was knighted for it within weeks. Tenzing got the George Medal, and a lifetime of being asked which of them stepped up first. Hillary got the title, the lecture circuit, and eventually his face on New Zealand\u2019s five-dollar note. Yet the only photograph taken on the summit that day is of Tenzing\u2014ice axe up, flags snapping\u2014because Hillary had never taught him how to use the camera, and the top of Everest is not the time for a tutorial. The man in the picture spent the rest of his life as the second name in the sentence.<\/p>\n

Peedom\u2019s film is mostly not about the climb at all. It\u2019s about everything Tenzing had to survive just to reach the starting line\u2014a story about family and faith and where a person is allowed to belong. It\u2019s called, simply, Tenzing<\/i>, and everyone involved seems to have understood the assignment. \u201cTom knew that the movie was not his movie,\u201d Peedom told me. Willem Dafoe plays expedition leader Colonel John Hunt. The Sherpa climbing team is played by Himalayan actors out of Kathmandu, Canada, San Francisco, and India.<\/p>\n

I\u2019ve seen it twice so far and the climbing scenes and mountain sequences are extraordinary, and they\u2019re not what stays with you. What lingers is more subtle: a man moving toward something he believes is holy, surrounded by people who are certain he\u2019s doing something perverse.<\/p>\n

And at the center of the whole thing is a man very few people in the West have heard of, who had to brush up his English, learn Sherpa, learn to climb, and carry a film that looks like it cost nine figures. The harder job was the other one: getting Tenzing Norgay\u2019s name back to the front of his own sentence.<\/p>\n\n

Genden is a Chinese actor of Tibetan descent, born on the Tibetan plateau in Sichuan, in a village near Kasa Lake. His family kept yaks and horses and planted barley and potatoes, much like Tenzing Norgay, who herded his father\u2019s yaks in the shadow of Everest as a boy.<\/p>\n

\u201cThis is just normal life for us,\u201d Genden said, when I asked him to describe it. \u201cBut you are really close to nature. My hometown is almost like New Zealand or Switzerland.\u201d Then, because he\u2019s been living in cities: \u201cWhen you\u2019ve been in a big city for a long time, you recognize that beauty even more.\u201d<\/p>\n

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Genden Phuntsok photographed during the Toronto Film Festival.<\/span> (Photo: Caitlin Cronenberg)<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n

Before he ever auditioned, friends back home started sending him a black-and-white photograph. It was Tenzing on his wedding day. It\u2019s so strange,<\/i> they wrote. This man really looks like you.<\/i> Genden\u2019s reading of this is that it was fate. Peedom\u2019s reading is that she\u2019d been watching him for years in the films of the late Tibetan director Pema Tseden\u2014most notably Jinpa<\/i>, which took a screenwriting prize at Venice in 2018. To her, Genden\u2019s energy was obvious.<\/p>\n

\u201cThere was this really contained force,\u201d she said, \u201clike Champagne just sitting behind a cork, always about to explode.\u201d The production looked at roughly 2,000 actors around the world. It narrowed to three. Then Genden walked into a hotel lobby in Kathmandu for the workshops, and Peedom knew she had her Tenzing.<\/p>\n

Genden wasn\u2019t so sure. After the first audition he flew home to China, assuming he\u2019d lost the part, and then started preparing for it anyway. He read every book about Norgay he could find, in libraries and coffee shops, keeping a notebook for the English words he didn\u2019t understand, looking each one up and rereading the passage. \u201cSome books I read maybe four times,\u201d he said. \u201cThen I really knew what he did.\u201d Eventually the producers called: one more audition, this time in English, in Australia. \u201cI said OK, no problem. I went there, that was the last audition.\u201d He got it.<\/p>\n

When I asked whether a part like this had ever been a dream of his, he declined to treat it as one. \u201cYou can try hard to get somewhere. But the result is not something you can decide. If you really get the result you want, that\u2019s perfect. If you don\u2019t get it, that\u2019s also perfect\u2014because on the way, you gain knowledge and experience, and that is also the value of your life.\u201d<\/p>\n

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(Photo: Caitlin Cronenberg)<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n

Also, the yaks. I\u2019d heard a rumor he practiced his lines on them, and asked if it was true. \u201cThat\u2019s true. I\u2019m like a crazy person. I always say my dialogue to strangers, because I want to see whether they understand what I\u2019m saying in their language.\u201d Strangers, sheep, donkeys, dogs. \u201cI know they don\u2019t understand, but I pretend they are listening to me.\u201d Later, on set, he did this to Willem Dafoe, mid-meal, without warning. Dafoe said, \u201cWhat?\u201d Genden said, \u201cThat is our dialogue.\u201d After that Dafoe ran lines with him whenever he was ambushed, which was often.<\/p>\n

Peedom has been circling this story for a long time. Her 2015 documentary Sherpa<\/i> put her in touch with Tenzing\u2019s children and grandchildren, and it convinced her that the story she actually wanted\u2014everything Norgay\u2019s life before the expedition\u2014couldn\u2019t be told as a documentary, because none of it exists in any archive. So it became a drama, with the blessing of Tenzing\u2019s eldest son, Norbu, who came aboard as an executive producer. Her line in the sand was that none of the mountain would be shot on a stage. Everything from base camp up was filmed on real glaciers and real ice cliffs in New Zealand\u2019s Aoraki\/Mount Cook region, with plates shot on the actual Everest dropped into the deep background. The summit is Hochstetter Dome. \u201cAll real and practical,\u201d she said. It looks it.<\/p>\n

Her philosophy about actors is the same one that governs her documentaries: \u201cMemory is more powerful than imagination.\u201d If you want someone to play a Sherpa sirdar, you don\u2019t ask him to imagine it. You send him to Khumjung.<\/p>\n

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Filmmaker Jennifer Peedom with Genden Phuntsok behind the scenes of \u201cTenzing.\u201d<\/span> (Photo: Apple TV)<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n

So Genden moved in with Phurba Tashi, one of the great sirdars of Everest, who has summited the mountain 21 times, and who stopped only after his mother, who had begged him for years to quit, died while he was up there. \u201cPhurba is really like a tiger,\u201d Genden said. \u201cEndless. He never tires.\u201d Four hours of hiking every day, minimum. The whole household became his dialect coaches. Genden doesn\u2019t speak Sherpa\u2014it\u2019s a cousin of Tibetan, close but not the same\u2014so he\u2019d run his lines for Phurba\u2019s wife until she corrected his accent, then run them again until she understood him, then take them out into the village and test them on the neighbors. Phurba\u2019s young daughter drilled him too. Genden isn\u2019t a father; Peedom says watching Phurba with his kids is where he found the way he\u2019d play Tenzing with his daughters, Pem Pem and Nima.<\/p>\n

One day Phurba took him up the ridge across from the village and pointed. \u201cHe said: that is Mount Everest. It looks small, but that\u2019s because it\u2019s far away.\u201d Genden stood there. \u201cI was thinking: Oh my God\u2014that is almost the top of the world<\/i>.\u201d He shot a short video of it. He has watched it many times.<\/p>\n\n

Before he\u2019d met either of his famous co-stars, Genden called Peedom from Khumjung. \u201cHe said, \u2018Oh, Jen, I feel like I\u2019m carrying the weight of this whole movie on my shoulders. I just feel so much responsibility.\u2019 And I said, \u2018You and me both, buddy.\u2019\u201d<\/p>\n

The weight had a face. At the puja ceremony that opened production in Kathmandu, Norbu Tenzing<\/a> met Genden for the first time and, Peedom said, was \u201cjust very tearful. He just said, \u2018I feel like I\u2019m looking at my father.\u2019\u201d Genden remembers it from the other side. \u201cI had a feeling that we are blood.\u201d He told Norbu that his father was not a normal man, that he was a hero. Then something odd happened. Genden had a hundred stories he wanted to tell these people about the man he\u2019d been living inside for months, and couldn\u2019t. \u201cIt was like there was a piece of glass between us. I could see them, but somehow I couldn\u2019t really touch them.\u201d<\/p>\n

He carried that into the performance. \u201cMaybe that is Tenzing Norgay now\u2014he is somewhere higher; he can see everyone, but he cannot touch them.\u201d<\/p>\n

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Tenzin Dalha, Willem Dafoe, Genden Phuntsok, Harry Greenwood, Tom Hiddleston and Pasang Arya Sherpa in \u201cTenzing.\u201d<\/span> (Photo: Apple TV)<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n

Before filming, the production also reached Kanchha Sherpa,the last surviving member of the 1953 expedition, who died last year. What Kanchha remembered about Tenzing wasn\u2019t heroism. It was that the man would not stop checking on people. Sherpa, British, didn\u2019t matter. Are you OK? Do you need something?<\/i><\/p>\n

Genden took that literally. On the walk up from Lukla they stopped overnight in a village teahouse, Hiddleston in the next room, and Genden lay awake worrying about an Englishman\u2019s altitude. Before dawn he heard footsteps through the wall.<\/p>\n

Tom! Tom!<\/i><\/p>\n

Eh?<\/i><\/p>\n

Are you OK?<\/i><\/p>\n

I\u2019m OK, no problem.<\/i><\/p>\n

\u201cAnd I thought: OK, good.\u201d<\/p>\n\n

He had never climbed before. Growing up at altitude, working with yaks, swimming all day in a cold lake with a bag of tsampa<\/i> for lunch\u2014that\u2019s children playing after school, not mountaineering. So the production hired guides who\u2019d summited Everest multiple times and put him and Hiddleston on rock and ice in New Zealand until they looked like they belonged there. Then they dressed them in 1953 gear: leather boots, wool, crampons with all the bite of a butter knife.<\/p>\n

The crevasse scene is the one to watch for. Hillary drops in; Tenzing gets him out. Genden had to climb from the bottom to the lip, camera across from him, no stopping. \u201cIf I stopped, maybe I would fall.\u201d Three takes. Halfway up one of them he paused and looked down. \u201cTenzing didn\u2019t have a safety rope, and he was doing this work. If you fall down, you just die.\u201d He talked to himself, kept calm, kept going. He collapsed at the edge. Peedom told him they got the shot.<\/p>\n

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(Photo: Caitlin Cronenberg)<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n

The summit ridge, meanwhile, was shot in a single take\u2014not for art, but because un-footprinting snow takes a long time for the crew. And the question everyone asks\u2014who stepped up first\u2014the film answers by refusing it: a little after-you, no-after-you joking. Peedom\u2019s position is that for anyone who has shared a rope, it\u2019s \u201cthe most ridiculous question, and not even worth asking.\u201d Genden won\u2019t give a position of his own. He defers to the two men who were there. \u201cOur thinking about it was just what Tenzing Norgay and Edmund Hillary said: in their minds, who stepped first is not important. The most important thing is: we summited. Meaning, it\u2019s as if humanity summited.\u201d<\/p>\n

He has turned down a climb before. At 23 or 24, guiding back home, he walked two Europeans toward a holy mountain near his village. In his culture you don\u2019t climb the holy mountains. He told them that. They told him it wasn\u2019t a problem for them. \u201cSo I said: OK, if you want\u2014I respect you, you can go, but I don\u2019t go there.\u201d They made it about halfway, understood what they were standing in, and came back down. He tells the story without a flicker of vindication, which is what makes it land.<\/p>\n

\u201cWe are very tiny in front of nature,\u201d he said. \u201cSo we should understand that.\u201d He likes a line of Hillary\u2019s: not that they conquered the mountain, but that the mountain accepted them. The film\u2019s version belongs to Tenzing, after Hunt calls Chomolungma an enemy: Where they see mountains, we see ourselves. They are the bones and we are the blood.<\/i> Peedom workshopped the Sherpa tent arguments with actual climbing Sherpas until one of them said he\u2019d had that exact fight on Everest. A Sherpa anthropologist told her it was the first film she\u2019d seen that let Sherpas show a full spectrum of emotion, including anger.<\/p>\n

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(Photo: Caitlin Cronenberg)<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n

This is where the film does its most interesting work. Tenzing never argues that people shouldn\u2019t climb mountains. It just builds a world where the question is offered and then leaves you alone in it.<\/p>\n

What does Genden want people to take from it? Not a mountaineering tip. \u201cEvery Sherpa climbing with a team has a big family behind them\u2014waiting for their husband, their son, to come back safely, every day, every moment. I really hope the world sees this.\u201d<\/p>\n\n

The man on screen is grieving, contained, deep and calm because Peedom asked him to be. The man on my screen, calling from Toronto the morning after our shoot, is someone Peedom describes as \u201ca firecracker,\u201d and she\u2019s right. He wishes Pema Tseden, \u201creally like my father in my career,\u201d who died two years ago, could see the film. \u201cI really want to show him: I did this job.\u201d He\u2019d like to hike to Everest Base Camp; the summit, he says cheerfully, is not for a man his age. He\u2019d like to scuba dive someday, location unimportant: \u201cIt\u2019s a big ocean.\u201d<\/p>\n

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(Photo: Caitlin Cronenberg)<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n

Mostly, when he isn\u2019t working, he goes home to Sichuan and sits with his mother. His father is gone. \u201cSometimes I miss him and I want to call my father. But no one answers me in this world.\u201d So he drinks tea with his mom and gets her to tell stories from when she was young, and she cooks for him. I asked what. Potatoes, he said. Same as Tenzing grew. What kind?<\/p>\n

\u201cBoiled potatoes.\u201d<\/p>\n

There was one thing he confessed to regretting. After all those months in Tenzing\u2019s wool and leather, he was too shy to ask to keep a single piece of it. Then he brightened, and let me know he\u2019d be circulating this story and magazine back home. \u201cThey\u2019ll say: \u2018Oh, we have such a good man.\u2019\u201d<\/p>\n

They do.<\/p>\n

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Outside\u2019s October 2027 Digital Cover: Genden Phuntsok in \u201cTenzing.\u201d<\/span> (Photo: Caitlin Cronenberg)<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n


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Published October 9, 2026 03:59AM Genden Phuntsok had been walking for a full day. He was headed down to Lukla, Nepal, and the Tenzing-Hillary Airport, a narrow strip of asphalt at 9,300 feet where sticking the landing can feel like a life-or-death proposition. It was time to meet his co-star. Tom Hiddleston was arriving by<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":18018,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[35],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-18017","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-wild-living"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/wildgreenquest.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/18017","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/wildgreenquest.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/wildgreenquest.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/wildgreenquest.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/wildgreenquest.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=18017"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/wildgreenquest.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/18017\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/wildgreenquest.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/media\/18018"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/wildgreenquest.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=18017"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/wildgreenquest.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=18017"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/wildgreenquest.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=18017"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}