Everyone knows Edmund Hillary's name. Far fewer can place Tenzing Norgay, the Sherpa climber who stood beside him on Everest's summit on 29 May 1953. A new film, simply called Tenzing, tries to fix that — and the casting story behind it is almost as good as the movie.

Directed by Jennifer Peedom (whose 2015 documentary Sherpa first led her to the Norgay family), the film flips the usual script: Hillary, played by Tom Hiddleston, is the supporting role. Willem Dafoe turns up as expedition leader Colonel John Hunt. But the centre of the film is Tenzing's life before the mountain — his boyhood herding yaks, his faith, and the community that viewed his climb as anything but holy. It's in cinemas now and lands on Apple TV on 16 October.

The man playing Tenzing is Genden Phuntsok, a Chinese actor of Tibetan descent from a village near Kasa Lake in Sichuan, cast after a worldwide search of roughly 2,000 actors. He had never climbed a mountain. He didn't speak Sherpa. His preparation was old-school immersion: he moved in with veteran Everest sirdar Phurba Tashi (21 summits), hiked four hours a day, and drilled his Sherpa dialogue with the whole family — wife, daughter, neighbours, and reportedly any sheep, donkeys or dogs within earshot.

The production refused soundstages. Everything above base camp was shot for real on the glaciers of New Zealand's Aoraki/Mount Cook region, with the actors kitted out in authentic 1953 gear — leather boots, wool, crampons Peedom's team describes as blunt as butter knives. The most nerve-shredding sequence, a crevasse rescue, saw Phuntsok climbing unaided from the bottom of a real ice crevasse in three takes, pausing mid-climb to remind himself that Tenzing did this work with no safety rope at all.

There's a lovely detail for film buffs and Everest nerds alike: the only photo taken on the 1953 summit shows Tenzing, ice axe raised, because nobody had taught Hillary's teammate how to use the camera. And the eternal question — who stepped up first? — is answered in the film by the two men's own verdict: it doesn't matter. As Phuntsok puts it, "we summited" — as if humanity summited.

For travellers, this is a rare big-budget film that treats the Khumbu region and Sherpa culture as the subject rather than the backdrop, shot with input from Tenzing's own family. It's a strong watch before or after trekking in Nepal, and a nudge to think beyond the Hillary checklist when you're in Namche Bazaar or Kathmandu.

Story via Outside Online.