Some couples do dinner and candles. Angela Nikolau and Ivan Beerkus did the spire of the Empire State Building 1,454 feet above Manhattan no ropes just each other. By the time they climbed back down this week they were engaged, arrested and trending everywhere. If you think this was just a stunt gone viral you’re missing the real story one that’s been years in the making and is already immortalised in a Netflix documentary.
Before Angela and Ivan was already a name in the underground world of rooftopping the extreme and very illegal art of scaling buildings, without safety gear. He’d built a following documenting his climbs across Russia’s Stalin-era skyscrapers back in 2014 and in that world he was already considered one of the best.
Angela was the newcomer. She’d grown up around performance with her parents were circus aerialists and she was drawn to rooftopping long before she ever met Ivan who was chasing the same freedom she’d watched her parents find on the trapeze. She started following his climbs online quietly trying to match what he was doing hoping he’d eventually notice her.
He did catch her eye not for her climbing at first but for her photos. In 2016, Ivan invited Angela on a sponsored trip to China to scale the tallest construction site in the world at the time. That trip changed everything for their careers and for their relationship.
Here’s the part people miss, Ivan brought the skill and the daring but Angela is the one who turned rooftopping into a performance. With her circus and dance background she wasn’t satisfied with just reaching the top she wanted to pose and tell a story once she got there. A visual language that turned a niche extreme sport into something people couldn’t stop watching.
She’s said it herself rooftopping is her art form. That shift from “look how high we climbed” to “look what we created up here” is exactly what took the couple from niche daredevils to global names, and eventually landed them a Netflix documentary deal.
Their story is the heart of “Skywalkers: A Love Story” the 2024 Netflix documentary that follows the couple across the globe as they scale some of the tallest structures on Earth all while trying to keep their relationship intact under insane pressure. The film’s biggest set piece is their 2022 climb of Malaysia’s Merdeka 118 the second-tallest building in the world a mission that took over 30 hours and forced them to hide from construction crews for more than a day.
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The documentary doesn’t shy away from the tension either with arguments mid-climb, real fear, real fights about trust. Because when your relationship depends on someone catching you hundreds of feet off the ground, love and survival become the same conversation.
“Skywalkers: A Love Story” is streaming on Netflix now, and if this week’s headlines have you curious it’s the perfect place to understand how two people fell in love while risking their lives together, build by build city by city.
This week’s Empire State Building climb wasn’t part of any Netflix production it was all them. The couple hid inside the building overnight, made their way up to the 102nd floor, and free-climbed the antenna to unfurl a banner reading “When the power of love beats the love of power, the world knows peace.” Once they made their way back down to a lower platform, Ivan got down on one knee and proposed. Angela said yes.
Minutes later, NYPD’s Emergency Service Unit climbed up to bring them down safely, and the couple was taken into custody, facing charges including burglary, reckless endangerment and criminal trespass. They were released on supervised release the next day.
Even the Empire State Building couldn’t resist a bit of humour about it saying the observation deck does “offer a practical way for the most memorable marriage proposals.”
