Months before a 1995 horseback riding accident left “Superman” actor Christopher Reeve quadriplegic, the award-winning actor was at sea filming a nature documentary about the annual migration of gray whales from the Arctic to Mexico.
Nearly 30 years later, the actor’s youngest son, Will Reeve, embarked on an emotional journey of his own to retrace his father’s final footsteps before being paralyzed from the neck down.
The ABC News correspondent’s expedition was chronicled in the network’s special “Will Reeve: Finding My Father,” which premiered on Feb. 26 and is now available to stream on Hulu.
“But while ‘Superman’ was the biggest thing he was in, and is a major reason why my dad is still a hero to millions of people, my favorite movie he ever did was a little-known nature documentary called ‘In the Wild: Gray Whales.’”
The hour-long documentary saw the late actor flying planes, scuba diving, and chasing mammoth whales as they journeyed across the North Pacific to mate and give birth in warmer waters.
Will Reeve, who described his father as “a man of action and adventure, an explorer engaging with the world,” said his life was forever changed shortly after the actor finished filming the documentary.
On May 27, 1995, Christopher Reeve broke his neck after being thrown off his horse during an equestrian competition in Culpeper, Virginia. The accident, which occurred less than two weeks before Will Reeve’s third birthday, left the actor confined to a wheelchair and dependent on a ventilator to breathe.
Christopher Reeve, who also had two children—Matthew Reeve, 45, and Alexandra Reeve Givens, 41—from a previous relationship, died on Oct. 10, 2004, due to complications from his spinal cord injury. He was 52; his youngest son was only 12.
“The world knows my dad as Superman, and as the face of spinal cord injury—a heroic figure fighting for others and for himself,” Will Reeve wrote in part.
‘Finding My Father’
In the new ABC special, Will Reeve visits the same exotic locations his father explored in 1995 while filming “In the Wild,” including St. Lawrence Island, located in the Bering Sea off Alaska, and the San Ignacio Lagoon in Baja California Sur, Mexico.The news correspondent said he hoped the experience would help him answer questions lingering after his father’s death, such as how to continue his legacy and what kind of man his father would have wanted him to become.
“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,” Will Reeve wrote.
The New York City-based reporter said he initially wanted to make the trip alone.
“But as I’ve grown older, I’ve realized that my experiences of love and loss and honor and legacy and the existential questions that arise from it all are universal,” he said.
“I wanted the world to remember Christopher Reeve as a hero, sure, a super man, an advocate, activist, and author, all these things that he was. But I also wanted to bring the world with me on a literal and figurative quest to find my dad at his essence.”
Christopher Reeve landed his breakout role as Clark Kent in the 1978 film “Superman,” going on to reprise the character in three sequels: “Superman II” (1980), “Superman III” (1983), and “Superman IV: The Quest for Peace” (1987).
The actor is also known for his performances in “Somewhere in Time” (1980), “Deathtrap” (1982), “Street Smart” (1987), “Above Suspicion” (1995), and “Rear Window” (1998), among other films.
After his accident, Christopher Reeve became heavily involved in his advocacy work for people living with disabilities and spinal cord injuries—the subject of HBO’s 2024 documentary “Super/Man: The Christopher Reeve Story.”
The foundation was later renamed the Christopher & Dana Reeve Foundation following the death of the actor’s wife, Dana Reeve.
The actress, who succeeded her late husband as the foundation’s chair of the board of directors, died in March 2006 at age 44 from lung cancer despite being a nonsmoker.
