“Everest” true story: Here’s what happened to the real Mount Everest disaster climbers (plus a side-by-side look at the film’s cast)

Though Jason Clarke and Jake Gyllenhaal lead an A-list cast in Everest, the real star of the 2015 movie is the mountain itself. Located in the Himalayas near the China-Nepal border, Mount Everest is said to be the planet's highest mountain above sea level.

As such, it's become a destination for mountaineers and thrill-seekers all over the world. The danger and grandeur promised by Everest also brought out audiences, with Icelandic director Baltasar Kormákur's film pulling in a worldwide gross of over $203 million on a $55 million budget.

Now that the film is streaming on Netflix, new viewers may be curious about the events depicted in the film. So, is Everest based on a true story? Are the characters played by Gyllenhaal and Clarke inspired by real people? Read on as we answer those questions and more.

What is Everest about?

Set in 1996, Everest follows two expedition groups, Adventure Consultants and Mountain Madness, on a climb to the summit of Mount Everest. The former is led by Kiwi mountaineer Rob Hall (Clarke), an experienced climber who has previously ascended Everest four times. Joining him is an American journalist, Jon Krakauer (Michael Kelly). The latter is led by Scott Fischer (Gyllenhaal), a macho American mountain guide who climbed Everest's peak two years prior to the events of the film.

The two groups combine, but the arrival of a full-scale blizzard impacts their path and vision. The dream to climb Everest is strong, but the climbers nevertheless struggle with altitude sickness, hypoxia, and high-altitude pulmonary edema as they try to return to their base camp.

Is Everest based on a true story?

Yes, Everest is based on a real-life tragedy in which eight people died while trying to climb Mount Everest in 1996.

Several climbers who survived the storm wrote memoirs about their experience on the mountain. The most famous is Krakauer's Into Thin Air, a book EW called "a horrible triumph" that "offers readers the emotional immediacy of a survivor’s testament as well as the precision, detail, and quest for accuracy of a great piece of journalism." (Survivor Anatoli Boukreev, played in Everest by Ingvar Eggert Sigurðsson, penned his own book refuting some of Krakauer's claims, though Krakauer stands by his account.)

But Everest isn't a direct adaptation of either book. Though it draws much inspiration and information from climber Beck Weathers’ Left For Dead, the screenplay by William Nicholson (Les Miserables) and Simon Beaufoy (Slumdog Millionaire) is considered an original, cumulative account of their own research. As director Kormákur explained to Entertainment Weekly, it was also informed by previously-unheard audio tapes between the climbers and base camp.

“None of the books that have been written had access to these tapes,” Kormákur told EW. “They put them away and wanted to try to move onward with their life. But they listened to it with us which was incredibly moving and, of course, very traumatic for them to go through again. But it was also very informative because we got all the small details. There were very different stories out there in many of those books and we wanted to try to understand what was misunderstood. And a lot of this came through those tapes.”

Several lines in the film, Kormákur said, are taken directly from the tapes. He told EW that this was part of an effort to "humanize" the climbers. "I didn’t want to ridicule or create a villain that doesn’t exit… or a hero that didn’t exist," he said. "I wanted to be true and show the mistakes and failures that happened on the mountain. This isn’t about a group of people who go up a mountain and get blown off by a storm. They were in real bad shape before the storm came in. The storm was just the final thing that finished them off.”

When EW's writer asked him about Krakauer's bestseller, Kormákur was dismissive. “To be honest I wasn’t that interested in telling a story about a writer on a mountain," he said. "I’ve seen a lot of movies about writers. His book is a first-person account and there are a lot of things that he assumes or thought that happened that didn’t really happen. This is the story of a group of people who are going up this mountain and I wanted to be true to that.”

For his part, Krakauer, who also penned the popular nonfiction books Into the Wild and Under the Banner of Heaven, is not a fan of Everest. “It’s total bull," he told the L.A. Times following the film's release. "Anyone who goes to that movie and wants a fact-based account should read Into Thin Air.”

He also took issue with a scene in the film in which his character neglects to help with a rescue attempt due to being snow blind, saying, "I never had that conversation."

Who's in the Everest movie cast?

By and large, the Everest cast plays real people who were on Mount Everest in May 1996. Below, take a look at who plays who.

Jason Clarke as Rob Hall

Australian actor Jason Clarke has appeared in a variety of critically acclaimed and award-winning films, including Zero Dark Thirty (2012), The Great Gatsby (2013), and Mudbound (2017). Most recently, he played Lakers coach Jerry West on HBO's Winning Time: The Rise of the Lakers Dynasty (2022–2023) and the supremely hateable Roger Robb in the Oscar-winning Oppenheimer (2023).

Clarke plays Rob Hall, an experienced mountaineer who famously summited the seven highest peaks in the world in seven months alongside climber Gary Ball. As depicted in the film, his wife, Jan Arnold, was pregnant at the time of his death. They met during an Everest summit attempt in the early '90s.

"Rob had a very dry, laconic sense of humor," Guy Cotter, a friend of Hall's, told PBS. "You first meet him and you think, 'This guy's all business.' And Rob would have everything organized; he'd be sort of making sure everything was going well. He wasn't the sort of character who would stand up and just order everybody around; he always gave a lot back. There was always a lot of fun, a lot of smiles, a lot of subtle, wry jokes that you had to know him for a little while before you'd get the hang of it."

Jake Gyllenhaal as Scott Fischer

Jake Gyllenhaal, one of the 21st century's most recognizable actors, has deftly pivoted between blockbuster fare (Spider-Man: Far From Home, The Day After Tomorrow) and more challenging, cerebral fare (Donnie Darko, Zodiac, Enemy). His work in Ang Lee's Brokeback Mountain (2005) scored him an Academy Award nomination. Most recently, he appeared in Doug Liman's Road House reboot (2024) and Apple TV+'s Presumed Innocent series (2024).

Related: The 15 best Jake Gyllenhaal performances

Gyllenhaal plays Scott Fischer, who, prior to his death, had climbed both Everest and K2, the two highest peaks on the planet. Friends described him as "larger-than-life" with an "incredibly magnetic personality."

Josh Brolin as Beck Weathers

Though Josh Brolin found early success in The Goonies (1985), his career really took off with his disquieting turn in the Coen Brothers' No Country For Old Men (2007). Since then, he's worked with some of the best living filmmakers, including Paul Thomas Anderson (Inherent Vice), Denis Villeneuve (Dune, Dune 2), Oliver Stone (W.), and Spike Lee (Oldboy). He received an Academy Award nomination for his performance in Gus Van Sant's Milk (2008). And, of course, he played Thanos in the Marvel Cinematic Universe.

Brolin plays Beck Weathers, a climber who was part of Hall's expedition. During the storm, he fell into a hypothermic coma but survived. In 2000, he wrote a memoir about the tragedy, Left For Dead: My Journey Home From Everest.

John Hawkes as Doug Hansen

John Hawkes was nominated for an Oscar for his turn in 2010's Winter's Bone, though you may also recognize him from series like Deadwood (2004–2006), Eastbound & Down (2009–2013), and True Detective: Night Country (2024). His film credits include American Gangster (2007), Lincoln (2012), and Three Billboards Outside Ebbing, Missouri (2017), as well as The Perfect Storm (2000), another story of a real-life tragedy.

Hawkes' Doug Hansen was a passionate climber from Washington who worked as a postal worker. Lou Kasischke, a survivor of the climb, described Hansen as "very determined," while Weathers said he was "in his element" on the mountain. He was one of the eight who died on the expedition.

Emily Watson as Helen Wilton

Emily Watson's debut film role in Lars Von Trier's Breaking the Waves (1996) scored the actress her first Academy Award nomination, with her second coming two years later for Hilary and Jackie (1998). Since then, Watson has appeared in films like Paul Thomas Anderson's Punch-Drunk Love (2002), Charlie Kaufman's Synecdoche, New York (2008), and Matthew Vaughn's Kingsman: The Golden Circle (2017). She also had an Emmy-nominated turn in HBO's Chernobyl (2019) and recently starred in Dune: Prophecy (2024).

Watson plays expedition associate Helen Wilton, who survived the storm and would later join Everest director Kormákur in listening to the audio tapes from the tragedy.

Michael Kelly as Jon Krakauer

Michael Kelly is best known for playing Doug Stamper on Netflix's House of Cards and CIA agent Mike November on Amazon Prime's Jack Ryan. Most recently, he had leading roles on Taylor Sheridan's Special Ops: Lioness (2023–present) and HBO's Batman spinoff The Penguin (2024).

Kelly plays Jon Krakauer, the acclaimed author who chronicled his experience on Everest in the bestselling book Into Thin Air (1997). In an interview with the L.A. Times following the release of Everest, the Times wrote that Krakauer found his portrayal in the film to be a "personal affront." He also noted that Kelly never reached out to him prior to filming.

Sam Worthington as Guy Cotter

Sam Worthington has appeared in several blockbuster films, including Terminator Salvation (2009) and Clash of the Titans (2010), though most audiences know him as Jake Sully from Avatar (2009) and Avatar: The Way of the Water (2022). He also starred in Under the Banner of Heaven (2022), FX's adaptation of another Krakauer book.

Worthington plays Guy Cotter, the now-CEO of Adventure Consultants and a survivor of the blizzard. He served as a consultant on Everest, telling HuffPost that he worked to ensure the cast and crew's safety during filming and would let Kormákur know if anything looked "bogus or just plain wrong."

Speaking to Worthington's performance, he cracked, "He obviously doesn’t have my charisma or sense of humor but he did ok! Seriously though, it’s pretty hard to connect with someone portraying you, and I think there wasn’t a lot of scope from the director for him to portray more emotion in the scenes, so I thought the performance was reasonable."

Where was Everest filmed?

According to Kent Harvey, Everest's second unit director of photography, many of the climbing sequences were shot in the Dolomite Mountains in Italy. Additional filming was done in Nepal, with the actors making part of the trek to the Everest base camp, though the actors did not actually film at the real base camp.

Instead, the base camp was constructed at Italy's Cinecitta Studios. As for the Hillary Step, a 40-foot vertical rock face that serves as one of the most challenging parts of the Everest climb, the site was built at Pinewood Studios in England.

"They had [Everest climber] David Breashears and a bunch of Sherpas there as consultants," Harvey told Outside. "It was incredible. It all looked very real. But it was still surrounded in green screen."

The crew did, however, need to get real Everest footage to incorporate into the film. According to Havey, that was a challenge. "You can’t just take your average Hollywood crew person to the top of Everest," he said. "I had to assemble a team of people that had a lot of experience climbing, had spent time on Everest, but also had some familiarity with the movie-making process. I also wanted some guide friends that could do stunt double work."

What did EW say about Everest?

Upon release, EW's critic called Everest "a relentless 3-D workout" that "stages all of the high-altitude chaos effectively, if a bit too chaotically."

He continues, "It may sound cold to say that while all of the performances are solid, it’s the danger of Everest that’s the film’s primary lure. But no one pays IMAX ticket prices for nuanced human drama, and the film’s ­dizzying climbing scenes and vertiginous don’t-look-down moments are what give it its heart-quickening power. Shot in Nepal and Italy, Everest makes you feel how mismatched and exposed even the strongest climber must have felt when a blizzard kicked up during this group’s descent, ­leaving them stranded and doomed."

But all that chaos ultimately serves to confuse, turning these real-life figures into "a sea of parkas." His review reads, "Maybe that’s the point — that Mother Nature doesn’t discriminate. But I doubt it. Plus, it shouldn’t be. When the lights come up, you don’t want to feel like you’ve watched a better Cliffhanger. You want to understand the tragedy you’ve just watched. Yes, you want to be entertained, but you also want the icy, whipping wind of reality to sting."

Read EW's full B- review here.

Where can I watch Everest?

Everest is currently streaming on Netflix. You can also rent or buy it via Amazon Prime.

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