‘Skyscraper Live’ Producer on Why Alex Honnold Is Really Climbing Taipei 101 for Netflix: “TV Is Mostly a Necessary Evil for Him”

Veteran TV producer Grant Mansfield says any criticism of Alex Honnold’s imminent attempt to free solo the Taipei 101 skyscraper for Netflix as a mere spectacle for spectacle’s sake misunderstands the athlete at the center of the feat.

“Alex is obviously an interesting guy, and I think TV is mostly a necessary evil for him,” Mansfield says. “He has said on several occasions that he would climb this building for nothing, even if no one was watching.”

Mansfield’s Plimsoll Productions is the lead producer of Skyscraper Live, Netflix’s global broadcast of Honnold’s daring attempt to climb one of Asia’s tallest buildings without ropes (set to take place Saturday at 8 p.m. ET, after a one-day delay due to dangerous rain conditions). Plimsoll also produced Honnold’s two most recent documentary projects — The Devil’s Climb and Arctic Ascent with Alex Honnold, both for National Geographic — and he says his company effectively acts as Honnold’s exclusive TV partner, even though they don’t have a formal deal in place.

“Both of our shows together went really well, but the thing he kept saying was that he’s always wanted to climb a huge skyscraper in general — and Taipei 101 in particular,” Mansfield says. He eventually learned that Honnold had been trying to get permission to climb the towering Taiwanese landmark since at least 2013 — well before he became world-famous thanks to his harrowing, Oscar-winning documentary Free Solo in 2018 — but had never made much headway with the authorities who oversee the building.

“Obviously, if you want to climb a famous piece of rock, usually you can just go out into the wilderness and do it,” Mansfield adds. “But even for a climber as renowned as Alex, it’s very difficult to get legal permission to climb a building that’s such a huge public landmark.”

He adds: “Basically, the only way to make it happen would be to hire a production company and find a deep-pocketed network that supported the idea.”

After discussions with Honnold, Mansfield first approached Netflix, which expressed tentative interest, and then began a lengthy approvals process. The first step was convincing the Taipei Financial Center Corporation (TFCC), a Taiwanese holding company responsible for managing of the Taipei 101 skyscraper. As luck would have it, Mansfield says, Janet Chia, a prominent Taiwanese model and former television host, had been appointed chairwoman of the TFCC in 2024 and was responsible for promoting the architectural icon’s global visibility. The chairwoman’s background in entertainment made the Netflix-backed proposal “a very good fit,” as Mansfield puts it. TFCC soon presented the pitch to the Taipei government, which, after six months of arduous negotiations, eventually gave the green light.

“Then we went back to Netflix and said, ‘Right — so are you really prepared to pay for this?’” Mansfield remembers.

Netflix was indeed prepared, seeing a ready opportunity for a unique piece of must-catch appointment viewing — something that would fit neatly into the company’s growing slate of live sports and events programming.

But all of these machinations — and the “necessary evil” of becoming the focus of a global televised spectacle — remained of relatively little interest to Honnold.

Mansfield says the climber told his team that he surveyed the world’s great skyscrapers and settled on Taipei 101 as his target all those years ago because “it’s well designed for climbing, in the sense that there are a series of platforms that he can stop to rest on, and there are good handholds all the way up.”

He adds, “The more romantic thing, though, is that it’s simply a very beautiful building in its own right. The aesthetics of it are genuinely important to him. Alex looks for that in nature, too — a rock face that’s just sort of singular. In this city of skyscrapers, Taipei 101 is the magnificent structure that really stands out. I really do think the beauty of the act is what’s behind this for him.”