Tenzing director explains Johnny Flynn cameo

Tenzing director Jennifer Peedom has explained why Johnny Flynn makes a cameo in her new movie.

The upcoming biographical drama tells the true story of Nepalese-Indian Sherpa mountaineer Tenzing Norgay and New Zealand explorer Sir Edmund Hillary becoming the first climbers to reach the summit of Mount Everest in 1953.

It opens with a flashback of Tenzing as a child meeting English mountaineer George Mallory, played by Flynn, who was involved in the first three British Mount Everest expeditions in the 1920s.

When asked how she secured the busy British actor for such a small role, Peedom told Cover Media that they had a mutual friend, non-fiction author Robert Macfarlane, with whom she wrote the scripts for her documentaries Mountain and River.

"When Johnny's name came up and I asked him, I think I sent him a letter as well, he knew those films and knew Robert Macfarlane and our friendship and so I think it came out of that," she shared. "But he did say to me, 'I've been looking for an opportunity to come to the Himalayas, and this is it, I'm there.'"

Peedom noted that the MobLand actor had to stay on location for five days to acclimatise to the conditions, even though his scene didn't take that long to shoot.

After getting a taste of working with Flynn, the director hopes to collaborate with him again in the future.

"It was so great having him there. He was so much fun and such an effortless performer," she praised. "I'd work with him again in a heartbeat. He was great... just somebody who's up for the kind of experience of, you know, it's a very challenging place to get to, and we're shooting at very high altitude in extreme wind, and he was just fantastic."

Tenzing, starring Tom Hiddleston and Genden Phuntsok as Hillary and Tenzing respectively, premieres on Apple TV on Friday.