Just months before a horseriding accident paralyzed him from the neck down, forcing him to use a ventilator for the rest of his life, actor Christopher Reeve was flying planes, scuba diving and chasing whales.
The actor was embracing all of this adventure for a nature documentary, “In the Wild: Gray Whales with Christopher Reeve.”
Although it was a little-known, made-for-TV documentary that was just an hour long — a far cry from the “Superman” films that made Reeve a household name — Will Reeve considers it to be his favorite movie that stars his dad.
“When I was a little kid, my dad and I watched it on VHS over and over,” Will Reeve wrote in an essay shared on ABC News. “I loved it because it had all these almost mythical elements to it: rugged, exotic locations, 40-ton whales that would let humans touch them, and a version of my dad that I had been robbed of the chance to know.”
Will Reeve was only 2 at the time of the accident — just a few weeks shy of this third birthday. Nine years later, his father died from complications related to the accident.
Although a recent Sundance Film Festival documentary explored the ups and downs of Christopher Reeve’s life — guided with remarkable vulnerability by Reeve’s three children — for Will Reeve, the story was incomplete.
He dreamed of visiting the places his father explored in those months before the life-altering accident — of literally retracing his father’s footsteps.
“I’ve wrestled with lots of questions. What parts of my dad I can carry forward into the world. What kind of man he would have wanted me to be? And did he leave clues for me to help piece that together for myself?” Reeve wrote in his essay. “I hoped by going to the last places he’d been before his accident, I’d be able to get closer to those answers and the active, daring, adventurous father I had heard stories about, and seen time and again in that gray whale documentary, but never fully gotten to experience for myself.”
Now, 30 years since Christopher Reeve’s accident, Will Reeve is sharing his own exploration of the places his father traveled — and the discoveries he made about his dad along the way.
How to watch ‘Will Reeve: Finding My Father’
“My father was my hero,” Reeve says in the trailer for “Will Reeve: Finding My Father,” which premieres Wednesday night on ABC. “To millions, he was Superman. I idolize and miss a different Christopher Reeve ... dad.”
Reeve has long had his sights set on retracing his father’s expedition, which tracked the Pacific gray whale migration and led him to Mexico and an island near Siberia.
The ABC News correspondent has said putting the nature documentary more in the spotlight — and visiting some of the places himself — was a way to get to know his father better.
“It has been my mission for years now to find a way to show the world the Christopher Reeve on display in that hourlong nature documentary and to use the 30-year-old film as an entry point into the void I’ve had in me since he was injured and since he’s been gone,” Reeve wrote in his essay for ABC News.
“I’ve inherited some of my dad’s sense of adventure and have carried it with me into my job every day at ‘Good Morning America’ and across ABC News,” he said in the trailer. “I’ve gotten to travel the world telling stories, but this is the one story that needs an ending.”
After its premiere on ABC, the one-hour special will be available for streaming on Hulu.
Will Reeve on ‘Super/Man: The Christopher Reeve Story’
“Finding My Father” comes a year after Reeve and his siblings attended the Sundance Film Festival for the premiere of “Super/Man: The Christopher Reeve Story.”
The film draws from raw interviews with Reeve’s children, archives and home videos to show how the actor went from being a relative unknown to an on-screen superhero to a real-life hero as he became a public face for disability research and activism, the Deseret News previously reported.
Opening up for the film involved “reliving a lot of trauma and reliving a lot of happiness,” Reeve said.
“We wanted this project to be the definitive story of our dad’s life, and that requires an emotional ride,” Will Reeve told the Deseret News ahead of the film’s premiere. “And we were prepared for it, as much as one can be.”
The film also touches on Will Reeve’s mother, Dana Reeve, who died less than two years after her husband following an unexpected lung cancer diagnosis.
Will Reeve was just 13 when he lost both of his parents.
Following the Sundance screening, Reeve became emotional as he shared that his adopted family — “the single greatest thing” his mother ever did for him — was in the audience. He said he was overwhelmed with love and gratitude for his adopted family and for the love both of his parents gave him, as well as the bond he has with his two siblings.
“The three of us were given a great head start as people just having these role models in our lives and the values instilled in them,” he said.
All three siblings are involved with the Christopher and Dana Reeve Foundation, helping to carry on their parents’ legacy. As they stood in front of the first few hundred people to view the movie about their father at Sundance, they were visibly proud.
“We’re proud of all of it,” Will Reeve said, per Deseret News. “We’re proud of all the complexities and nuances and not-so-great elements of the story, because that’s humanity, that’s what makes a human. And that’s what makes an ordinary individual into a hero, is all of the messiness and all of the striving to be better.”