When Sir Ian McKellen flew from England to New Zealand to start production on the first Lord of the Rings movie, he had a request: to visit another sir, Sir Edmund Hillary, who, along with Sherpa Tenzing Norgay, was the first person to stand atop Mt. Everest. McKellen, who recounted the story to photographer Jim Herrington, grew up in a climbing family—his dad spent weekends scrambling the peaks of North Wales, most notably in Snowdonia.
McKellen did get to meet Hillary, and over a talk encouraged by multiple bottles of wine, he eventually got to a question much on his mind.
“Is it true that you ate a Kendal mint cake on the top of Mt. Everest?”
“Tenzing and I may have shared a mint cake just below the summit, yes,” replied Hillary.
McKellen paused dramatically in the retelling.
“Was it the white or the brown?”
“It was the brown.”
Here were two titans of Britannia, deep in their cups, and of all the
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