Alex Honnold Didn’t Love Being Cast as the Villain in The Dark Wizard

In HBO’s documentary series The Dark Wizard, Alex Honnold is framed as the cool-headed rival who cracked the late Dean Potter’s ego. On his podcast Climbing Gold, the American climber pushes back against that version of the story, restoring some complexity to a relationship built more on admiration than animosity.

Dean Potter © The Dark Wizard

In The Dark Wizard, HBO’s series about Dean Potter, Alex Honnold almost becomes the perfect counterpoint to Yosemite’s “dark wizard.” On one side: Potter, mystical, restless, self-styled as both artist and risk-taker, obsessed with danger, performance, and the mark he would leave on the Valley. On the other: Honnold, younger, colder, more methodical, arriving with an almost irritating ability to climb the big vertical dreams Potter had carried around for years — sometimes before him, sometimes better.

In our story on the series, Peter Mortimer and Nick Rosen explained how Honnold’s arrival eventually cracked Potter’s ego. “Dean Potter could have been a mentor to Alex Honnold,” Rosen told us. Instead, the relationship became a messy handoff between eras: the icon watching the future walk in.

Honnold, though, seems less convinced by the “villain” role the documentary gives him.

A Rivalry, Cut for TV

On a recent episode of Climbing Gold, titled “Getting It Right: Charlize Theron and Beth Rodden” and released May 1, 2026, Honnold spoke briefly about HBO’s production. The episode is mainly about Apex, the film in which Charlize Theron plays a climber with Beth Rodden’s support behind the scenes. But in the introduction, Honnold also says a few words about The Dark Wizard — enough to reopen one of the documentary’s most sensitive threads: his supposed rivalry with Dean Potter.

“Dean was like my childhood hero. I was like, what a dude”

Alex Honnold

Asked whether it felt strange to be presented as the story’s villain, Honnold does not make a big deal of it, but he does not dodge the question either. “Kind of. Yeah,” he says. “We did like twelve hours of interview and they basically took all the most extreme stuff and like turned into, like deeply competitive, hates Dean, you know.” Then he adds: “It’s like slightly annoying.”

Honnold is not trying to settle scores with the filmmakers. He calls the series “amazing” and says he is glad it exists. “The Dark Wizard’s amazing. It’s like, I’m glad they made it,” he says. But to him, Potter was never just an inconvenient rival in the Yosemite archive. “Dean was such a hero of mine,” Honnold says, “and really the whole generation of climbers.” It is a short line, but it puts back some of the nuance that documentary storytelling often strips away. Even nonfiction needs clean arcs: a hero, a flaw, a rival, a fall. In The Dark Wizard, Honnold becomes the natural rival — the person who does not merely challenge the throne, but eventually sits on it.

Honnold’s point is simple: being seen as a threat is not the same as setting out to be one.

Taken together, the facts do make the rivalry easy to understand. In 2008, Honnold made the first free solo of Half Dome — free soloing meaning climbing without a rope, where a fall is not an option — on a project Potter had wanted for himself. In The Dark Wizard, Potter’s hurt is stated plainly. Speaking about Honnold’s Half Dome solo, Potter says in archival footage used in the series: “Fuck. I wanted to do that.” He describes his younger rival as “a competitive little asshole” who had come in and done projects he knew mattered to him. In other words, HBO did not invent the rivalry out of thin air. It sharpened it, shaped it for the screen, but the tension was real.

In 2012, Honnold dominated Yosemite. He set the speed record on the Nose with Hans Florine and completed the Yosemite Triple Crown as free solos. In the series, Honnold sums up that year with his usual bluntness: in effect, he had done almost everything Dean Potter had already done or still dreamed of doing, often faster, sometimes in a cleaner style. On screen, that makes for a compelling story: the young gun stepping all over the older legend’s ground.

Honnold prefers a less dramatic reading. He does not deny being competitive. He just puts that competitiveness back into the culture of Yosemite at the time. “Competitive in the same way that I was competing with literally everybody else in the Valley,” he says. “But no, I mean, didn’t have any particular mean Dean was like my childhood hero. I was like, what a dude.” Then comes the very Honnold part, blunt and almost clinically simple: “At a certain point you realize that you can do all the things that your childhood hero is doing and you’re just kinda like, cool, I’ll do all this.”

It is a hard line, but it is also very Honnold: respectful, admiring, and still unable to give up the cold analysis.

The Wizard and the Method

That is where the discomfort at the heart of The Dark Wizard becomes interesting. The series shows, with real force, what Honnold’s arrival did to Potter. But Honnold is reminding us that being perceived as a threat does not mean you meant to be one.

In Potter’s eyes, Honnold may have been the guy who came along and broke the spell. In Honnold’s memory, he was still the kid staring up at an extraordinary figure. That is what makes their shared story more powerful than a simple ego war. Potter built a near-mythic persona around himself. Honnold represented almost the opposite: the climber stripped of myth, practical and unromantic, able to turn someone else’s artistic vision into a series of executable moves. Potter wanted to give the void a cosmic meaning. Honnold showed that the same void could also be managed with climbing shoes, a photographic memory for holds, and an almost terrifying control of fear.

Despite his issues with the edit, Honnold does not dismiss the series. For him, the bigger point is that The Dark Wizard puts Dean Potter back at the center of climbing history, where a younger generation might otherwise miss him. “It makes me slightly sad that people that get into climbing now will have never heard of him because, you know, he died in 2016,” Honnold says. “And so it’s nice to sort of remember his legacy in some way.”

That lands almost like a right of reply. In HBO’s documentary, Honnold is the climber who surpasses the master. In his own memory, he is still the kid who watched Potter go first, then realized he could step into that space too.

Maybe that is where The Dark Wizard gets it right, even when it takes shortcuts. Myths are never passed down cleanly. They rub against each other, contradict each other, and eventually get overtaken. Dean Potter wanted to fly. Alex Honnold climbed. And while HBO chose to see a dramatic rivalry, Honnold seems to see a story that was just a little too perfect.