Alex Honnold risked his life to attempt to solo climb Taipei 101 live on Netflix, and the streaming service was prepared in case the veteran climber died in the process.
How Elle Duncanwho welcomed Skyscrapers live on Saturday, January 24, he said in the “Horrible announcement” podcastsomeone on the crew handed him a what-to-say card if Honnold, 40, fell to his death while trying to climb the 101-story skyscraper.
“There’s something to be said when five minutes before you go on the air, someone slips you a card of what you’re going to say if a person falls off a building and dies,” Duncan explained on the Thursday, Jan. 29, episode. “This was not an experience I had ever had before.”
Netflix also aired Honnold’s attempt on a 10-second delay because the issue it could be cut off if disaster struck. (Coincidence or not, it would take the average human about 10.2 seconds to free fall from the top of Taipei 101 with minimal air resistance, according to The Hollywood Reporter.)
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“He had a card in his lap that was basically like, ‘We’ve experienced a crash and we’re going off the air now and we’ll let you know as soon as we can about Alex’s condition,'” revealed Duncan, 42. “They were going to cut. We were behind schedule. They were going to cut something really wide, so obviously we’re not going to see it fall. Then he was going to appear on camera and make this statement, then we’d go off the air.”
Even though Duncan is now the only person to ever serve as the play-by-play voice of someone scaling a skyscraper solo, he took a lot of heat from viewers on social media. He has read the comments, including those who said he was talking about some of the drama, and took the criticism in stride.
“I looked at him again and said, ‘I was 10 years old,'” he said. “I was really anxious, and I think it showed in a way that I didn’t feel like when I was doing it.”
She added: “My tone probably didn’t match some of those moments and that I didn’t need to sell the drama. I went back and watched it, and I was like, ‘The drama is this guy is doing this crazy, like, look at these amazing pictures,’ that’s really all I need. I didn’t need to paint that picture, but I didn’t know.”
Duncan went to great lengths to prepare, even traveling to Honnold’s home before the climb to learn more about him. He joked that he didn’t even “see Taiwan” while he was there because he was in meetings and doing everything he could to prepare for the broadcast.
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But there were too many unknowns for Duncan to feel completely comfortable. The night before, she asked Honnold if he wanted to talk to her on the way up. Even Honnold couldn’t answer that: he’d never done a freestyle in front of anyone before, let alone in front of a global audience.
“This was a test case. There was no blueprint,” he said. “No one has ever narrated or hosted a desk where someone is climbing a building and could literally fall to their death at any moment.”
Duncan also knows that the event was not about her, but about Honnold and the historic feat he was attempting.
“Ultimately, the takeaway from watching Alex Honnold’s rise is that, as he said, ‘Life is finite,’ and if you have an opportunity in your life to do something that scares you and challenges you and pushes you, then you should do it, because we have so little time,” he said. “That, to me, was a success. I think we showed all of that, we showed who Alex was.”