Going underground: inside Ron Howard’s explosive movie about the Thai cave rescue
One day, retired firefighter Rick Stanton got a phone call at his home in Coventry. It was Ron Howard. He had good news. He had cast someone who had been in Lord of the Rings to play Stanton in his new movie, Thirteen Lives. Stanton’s mind raced. Ian McKellen? Andy Serkis? Probably not Cate Blanchett. “When I found out it was Viggo Mortensen, I was very pleased,” says Stanton, eyes glinting. “ I’d never really thought who would play me in a film, but he’d be up there.”
Stanton was one of five cavers (“I call myself a caver not a diver, and definitely not a spelunker because that’s American”) who rescued 12 boys of the Wild Boars football team and their coach from the Tham Luang cave in northern Thailand in June 2018. The boys, aged 11 to 16, had gone into the cave after football practice and got trapped by flood water. They survived for 18 days on an elevated rock two-and-a-half miles (4km) from the cave mouth, with hardly any food but sustained by meditation led by the 25-year-old coach, Ekaphol Chantawong, a former monk. And by hopes of rescue.
