“Zoe… Just hit me where it hurts,” Heughan responded when Ball asked him about the project. “We were supposed to be shooting this fantastic movie about Everest. Unfortunately, it’s not happening at the moment, but who knows? In the future it might, it’s just our schedules clashed…” Then he joked, “I’ll just go and jump off a cliff right now. A very high cliff, a very high Everest cliff.” Meanwhile, Heughan, who is busy promoting the Season 6 premiere of Outlander, which debuts Sunday, March 6, will shortly begin filming Season 7 of the time-travel STARZ series based on the best-selling novels by Diana Gabaldon. Everest was to be loosely based on the Jeffrey Archer novel Paths of Glory. Set in 1921, it would follow the true story of English mountaineer George Mallory (McGregor), who was selected by the Royal Geographic Society to scale the previously unconquerable Mt. Everest. Heughan was to play Mallory’s real-life rival, Aussie George Finch, who was also determined to make it to the top—not for king or country, but as a test of self. “Everest is about the first attempt to climb Mount Everest in 1921,” the movie’s intended director, DougLiman, explained to Variety in 2021. “It resulted in the first 11 deaths on Everest.” Mallory took part in the first three British expeditions to Mount Everest in the early 1920s and disappeared atop the famous peak in 1924 at the age of 38. His fate remained unknown until a search expedition discovered his body on May 1, 1999; whether or not Mallory and his climbing party made it to the summit before their deaths is still unknown. Finch, on the other hand, lived to be 82 and was the first person known to climb to a height exceeding 27,300 feet, although he still never reached Everest’s apex. In fact, Heughan told Variety recently that Finch “had all the ability” that Mallory had. “In fact," he added, “the two of them, if they had gone [up Everest] together, I think they would have conquered it.” Liman had promised that Everest would “be a thrill ride for the audience”—and Heughan is no stranger to thrillers. In his most recent film, SAS: Red Notice, he played Tom Buckingham, a wealthy scion of the British aristocracy, who disappoints his parents by becoming a ministry man, which translates to Special Forces. The film is based on the Andy McNab novel of the same name – and there could be a sequel! “I think we will want to explore the character more because, by the end of the movie, it’s only really the beginning for Tom,” Heughan told Parade.com in March 2021. “He’s just discovered that he’s a psychopath really and that he also has emotion, so that’s an intriguing place and it would be fun to explore what that means for Tom and where he goes with this new knowledge.” Next, Sam Heughan dishes the behind-the-scenes details of his road trip with Graham McTavish for Clanlands!
