--- name: "Alex Honnold" canonical: "https://film.one/person/alex-honnold" roles: ["Actor"] born: "17 August 1985" reviewed_on_fi1m: 1 updated: "2026-09-17T05:27:03.064340+00:00" licence: "© Fi1m Ltd. Written by AI under a human editor; checked against sources before publication. Quote with attribution and a link to the canonical URL." --- # Alex Honnold Actor. Born 17 August 1985 in Sacramento, California, USA. ## Details - **Work:** Actor - **Born:** 17 August 1985, Sacramento, California, USA - **Active:** 2018–present - **Also known as:** اليكس هونولد - **Works often with:** [Sanni McCandless](https://film.one/person/sanni-mccandless.md) - **Elsewhere:** https://www.wikidata.org/wiki/Q979249, https://www.imdb.com/name/nm3658958/, https://www.themoviedb.org/person/107800 ## Streaming the US now - **Disney+:** [*Free Solo*](https://film.one/film/free-solo.md) (82) For United States; add `?region=XX` for another country. ## Fi1m on Alex Honnold > Alex Honnold is not an actor and does not pretend to be. What he gives a camera is a man doing something appalling with complete calm, and the question in every film he appears in is whether the people filming can bear to watch. The thing Honnold does most on screen is chalk his hands. In *Free Solo* (2018) he does it in the van, on ledges, in the middle of conversations he would rather not be having, and it tells you more about him than any of the answers he gives Jimmy Chin and Elizabeth Chai Vasarhelyi when they ask him why. He talks about the possibility of his own death in the tone most people use for a long drive. He eats supper straight from the pan. As a subject he is almost entirely without performance, and that turns out to be the point of him. He was a climber long before he was a subject. He started at five, gave up an engineering degree at Berkeley around 2004 to climb full-time and moved into a van in 2007, the year his one-day free solos of Astroman and the Rostrum in Yosemite made the climbing world take notice. Cameras came later. He turns up in *Valley Uprising* (2014), a history of Yosemite climbing, and in *The Alpinist* (2021), about Marc-André Leclerc. But the film is *Free Solo*, the record of his 2017 ascent of Freerider on El Capitan without a rope, and it is the reason anyone outside climbing knows his name. What works about him on film is his refusal to help. Chin and Vasarhelyi put him in an MRI scanner and a scientist tells him the part of his brain that registers fear barely responds; they interview his mother; they keep asking why, and he keeps giving the first answer that comes to hand. We scored the film 82 and said the hour of preparation was thinner than the film thinks, and the thinness is mostly Honnold's doing. He is a poor witness to himself. He is a superb one to the wall. Watching him rehearse the Boulder Problem on a rope with Tommy Caldwell, then talk it through until Bob Eisenhardt's editing has made us see it with our eyes closed, is where the film finds him. When the film finally puts him on the wall without a rope, we stopped breathing and did not notice until it was over. Nothing in the framing told us to; it was the rehearsal footage doing its work, every hold already learned. Chin's crew is nearly as frightened as we were, and the film says so, which is the honest thing about it. Honnold himself looks, as he always looks, like a man doing his job. Sanni McCandless, who has the hardest part in *Free Solo*, gets closer to him than the directors manage: a plain question in a car draws an answer we found hard to hear, and it is the one time on screen he looks caught out. There is a lesson there for whoever films him next. Next, apparently, is *Skyscraper Live* (2026), a live broadcast of a free solo of Taipei 101. Do not ask him why. Point the camera and hope you can keep it steady. ## Biography Alex Honnold is an American rock climber who has appeared as himself in several documentary films. He is the subject of the 2018 documentary *Free Solo*, which documents his free solo ascent of El Capitan in Yosemite National Park. Honnold has also featured in *Valley Uprising* (2014), *The Alpinist* (2021), *Explorer: The Last Tepui* (2022) and *Girl Climber* (2025). He was born on 17 August 1985 in Sacramento, California. *Sources: en.wikipedia.org, advnture.com, britannica.com, rottentomatoes.com.* ## On Fi1m (1) - *Free Solo* (2018), Fi1m 82, as Self — [page](https://film.one/film/free-solo.md) ## Also credited on (not yet reviewed) - *Girl Climber* (2025), Actor ## Also known for - *Billions* (2016), Alex Honnold - *The Alpinist* (2021), Self - *Valley Uprising* (2014), Self - *Explorer: The Last Tepui* (2022), Self - *Skyscraper Live* (2026), Self --- © Fi1m Ltd. Written by AI under a human editor; checked against sources before publication. Quote with attribution and a link to the canonical URL. Canonical: https://film.one/person/alex-honnold