Will Reeve: Finding My Father is now streaming on Hulu. It documents Christopher Reeve‘s son Will‘s journey as he recreates an expedition that his father undertook, shortly before he became paralyzed in a horse riding accident in 1995.
“My dad had been filming this documentary about gray whales in Alaska and Mexico just months before his accident, so the production team finished the film without him,” says Will, who’s now an ABC News correspondent. “We had it on VHS and I basically wore the tape out, watching it over and over again.”
“From that young age, I knew that I wanted to make a pilgrimage to see what my dad saw and do what he did,” he adds.
For the documentary, Will managed to track down the sons of the men who were Christopher Reeve’s guides 30 years ago and had them do the same for him — fitting for a project whose “major throughline,” Will says, is “fathers and sons, parents and children, connections between generations, connections between man and nature.”
“Finding the sons was key to making this project sing,” he notes. “Because without them, it would have felt almost self-indulgent for me to just go on this cool expedition.”
But while retracing his dad’s footsteps, the greatest discovery Will made was the memories of the locals in Mexico and Alaska who remembered meeting Christopher Reeve, aka “Superman,” 30 years ago.
“Every one of them had a specific memory of encountering him, but they also had a specific memory of how he treated them,” Will notes. “And that was the most gratifying experience of it all: getting real world confirmation that my father was the type of man that I aspire to be.”
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