‘Skyscraper Live’ Host Reveals Netflix’s Prepared Statement If Alex Honnold Fell During Broadcast

Elle Duncan, the host of Netflix’s Skyscraper Live streaming event, revealed what the plan was if the worst happened and free solo climber Alex Honnold fell during the live event.

Honnold, 40, who was the subject of the Oscar-winning documentary Free Solo, climbed the 1,667-foot-tall Taipei 101 building in Taiwan with no safety equipment whatsoever on Sunday, January 25. The climb was successful and went off without any incident. However, Netflix and Duncan, 42, had a plan for if the climber had a misstep and fell.

“There’s something to be said when five minutes before you go on air, someone slides you a card of what you’re gonna say if a person falls off the building and dies,” she explained during the Thursday, January 29 episode of the Awful Announcing podcast, per E! News. “That was certainly not an experience I had ever had before.”

Duncan explained that the camera crew was told to cut away to a wide shot if Honnold fell so that the viewers at home would not see him get hurt or possibly die. She said the broadcast would then cut to her.

“I had a card on my lap that basically was like, ‘We’ve experienced a fall and we’re going to get off air now and we will update you as soon as we can on Alex’s condition,’” she revealed. “They were going to cut away.”

Netflix wasn’t relying on the quick reflexes of its camera crew. The Hollywood Reporter also revealed that the entire broadcast was on a roughly 10-second delay to allow them more time to react if something unfit for air happened. However, that isn’t as much time as it sounds. The outlet notes that a free fall from the very top of the building would take approximately 10.2 seconds with minimal air resistance before someone hit the ground.

Luckily, that wasn’t the case and the expert climber managed to scale the building without anything bad happening in a little more than an hour and a half.