The mountain of flesh and sculpted muscle that is Tom Hardy is set to tackle the only thing in the physical world potentially stronger and more intimidating than Tom Hardy. According to Deadline, the imposing British actor is in talks to play George Mallory, the British mountaineer who made three attempts at scaling Mount Everest in the 1920s. Bourne Identity director Doug Liman is attached to direct.
Mallory and his climbing partner, Andy Irvine, disappeared during the 1924 British Mount Everest Expedition. Mallory’s icy remains were discovered some 75 years later during a search expedition, and the question of whether or not he made to Everest’s summit has been the subject of educated guessing and wild speculation for years. So structure-wise, we imagine it might be something like Titanic, with scientists picking at Mallory’s frozen corpse before movie magic whisks us back in time to find out the real story.
It’s worth nothing that the Deadline article states that Mallory was “the first man to scale the world’s highest mountain” and while this is not altogether untrue (he definitely scaled it; we just don’t know if he made to the top) it points to a potential dramatic problem with Everest: how unsatisfying it would be to not see Hardy-as-Mallory going the distance with all 29,029 feet of Mount Everest. However, this is why Hollywood endings exist, right? So hopefully this will find Tom Hardy, playing Tom Hardy, scurrying up Everest in record time while wearing cargo shorts and a tank top, placing the frozen body of George Mallory at the peak, then proceeding to eat the Earth’s highest mountain from the top down, proving once and for all his terrifying dominion over our enfeebled natural world.