Will and Dwayne’s excellent adventure
British explorer Dwayne Fields pushed Will Smith to his limits for a new TV series – but that’s just the latest chapter in a life spent inspiring others to travel, as Greg Dickinson discovers
Dwayne Fields is walking backwards into a crevasse. When he reaches the edge, he takes a deep breath and leans backwards, allowing his support rope to pass slowly through his gloved grip. With each reverse step his crampons chip away shards of ice. Abseiling into the void, he pushes his feet into the frozen wall to steady himself, but his harness and support ropes are what prevent him from certain death.
His heart races beneath his thick protective gear. Partly because of the abyss that yawns beneath him, up to 1,000ft deep. But also because to his right is one of the most famous men on the planet, and Dwayne Fields is in charge of keeping him alive.
“Did you hear that crack?” asks Fields. “This is the kind of thing half [the population] would say nightmares are made of.
“You’re climbing down into an environment that’s constantly changing, there’s water filling in. Are you mad?” “Yeah,” says Will Smith, deadpan. “Half of us think that.”
The pair are in Iceland shooting an episode of the brand-new National Geographic adventure travel series, Welcome to Earth, which airs on Disney+ on Wednesday. Across six instalments, Will Smith is guided by an elite explorer to the planet’s extremes, into active volcanoes and to the depths of the ocean. In episode two, our protagonist is 37-year-old British explorer, Dwayne Fields.
The opening scene sees Smith and Fields disembark a helicopter and march across a glacier, like interplanetary soldiers on a mission to save the world. From the opening visuals it is clear this is not your normal shouldercam travel documentary, but rather a piece of non-fiction cinema (produced
by Academy Award-nominated filmmaker Darren Aronofsky, director of Black Swan and The Wrestler). The score drones like a sci-fi thriller, the panning camerawork dangles us terrifyingly above an inhospitable landscape, and the plotline is laid out in simple terms. We have a novice (Smith) and an expert (Fields), and their mission is to navigate off the glacier to find the sea.
Dwayne Fields’ personal journey began far from the polar ice, in the countryside of Jamaica. Raised by his great grandmother, his home didn’t have any electricity, running water or gas. The only thing for a child to do was find their own adventure.
“Being a kid in that rural part of Jamaica, you were expected to be outside all the time. The attitude was: ‘Get out, make yourself scarce, and come back when you’re hungry,’” Fields recalls. He describes his younger self as feral, free range, and always pushing boundaries. “I would get as close as I could to barking dogs before my nerves gave out and made me run away.”
Aged six, Fields moved to London to live with his mum, who he had only met twice before. He remembers arriving at his new home in Archway. He hadn’t seen any woodland on the drive there, and there were no trees in front of the house. There must be a forest in the garden, he decided, and so he sprinted through the house to find the greenery.
“I opened the curtains and all I could see was a brick wall and a bit of concrete. I thought: ‘No, this isn’t what I wanted my new world to be.’”
Adjusting to London life was tough. Fields recalls getting his wrist slapped by his mother when he reached out for a piece of fruit at a supermarket (“they grow on trees – why would you have to pay for them?”), and struggling to make friends. He had never watched Danger Mouse, never eaten a cheeseburger. He was from another world, and at school his teachers made him feel like he wouldn’t amount to anything, that he would never make a difference.
By his early 20s, Fields had learnt how to fit into what he describes as “the ambient noise” of London life. But then, in 2005, he was noticed. When a gang from a rival estate stole his moped, he ended up in an altercation and somebody pulled a gun on him.
“He’s raised the gun up. He’s pointed it at me. And he pulled the trigger.”
Fields remembers the sound of the gun firing.
“Then he cocked the gun back, pointed it at me and pulled the trigger again. I didn’t feel anything, but I felt like I’d been shot. Before he could do it a third time, one of the guys said: ‘It’s not worth it, don’t waste the bullet.’”
The gun had jammed, and what could have been the last day of Dwayne Fields’ life ended up being the first day of a new one. He was under pressure from friends to seek revenge on the young man who tried to kill him, but instead he retreated to the only environment where he has ever felt at home: in nature. Fields spent more time exploring the outdoors close to home – in Hackney Wick and Epping Forest – and then signed up to climb the country’s highest mountains as part of the Three Peaks Challenge.
“I was the most ill-prepared guy in history. Trainers, clothes that weren’t waterproof, the wrong socks. Everything was wrong about me. But I was doing something that made me feel happy.”
The adventure bug had set in. A series of expeditions followed, and in 2010, five years after his near-death experience, Fields became the first black Briton to walk 400 nautical miles to the magnetic North Pole. He has since appeared on Countryfile, Springwatch, and has been named an ambassador of The Scout Association. Then, just before the pandemic, the phone rang. He had been invited to guide Will Smith through Iceland’s harsh terrain for a new National Geographic / Disney+ series.
“It was something I couldn’t have dreamed of. He’s working with me? A little kid from Jamaica, barefooted, running around. Me? You have this selfdoubt which perpetuates.”
If Dwayne Fields has self-doubt, it’s not obvious in Welcome to Earth. After the opening hair-raising sequence in the crevasse (the purpose of this foray is never properly explained, but as a viewer you don’t particularly mind), Smith and Fields seek out a spot to get their kayak into a fast-flowing river. This part of their journey represents a particular psychological challenge for Will Smith, who describes himself as a “kid from West Philly who hates water”.
In one off-camera moment, Fields recalls setting things up by the side of the river, prepping the blow-up raft (or in Smith’s words, a “rubber floaty”), and noticing the actor staring tentatively downstream. The safety and security teams were scoping out the area in their own kayaks. Then one of them capsized.
“I looked at [Will Smith] and it was almost like: ‘Catch yourself, breathe, and rationalise this,’” says Fields. “It felt like he almost liked being in that ‘rationalise this’ space. To watch him pause, take a breath, gather himself, it was really emotive.”
So they got into the inflatable kayak. For a shoot like this, the crew was vast – up to 100 people at times. But for this sequence it was just Dwayne Fields and Will Smith in the kayak, thundering down a river booby-trapped with whirlpools, boils and unpredictable currents. Fields was tasked with making sure Will Smith didn’t tumble into the water.
Did he feel the pressure? “There’s no amount of people who can make you feel completely safe, or stop your heart racing when you cast off and you’re about to push off into fast-moving water. It’s down to us, fundamentally. That never leaves you.”
Their relationship went beyond that of guide and student. The two formed a bond on the 20-day shoot, and it wasn’t long before Fields was playing pranks on the superstar.
“We’d laugh with each other, make jokes at each other. There were times where I had an inkling the water was slightly deeper than it looked, and I’d say: ‘Will, just go and check how deep that is,’ and he’d step off and go down,” Fields laughs at the memory.
“When you’re in an environment like that, it doesn’t matter who you are or what life is like back home. When it’s you within the elements, because you’re never ‘against the elements’ in my opinion, there’s something quite levelling about that. You find yourself in the same place. When it rains you both feel it, when it’s cold you both feel it.”
Indeed, back on dry land after kayaking, Smith complains of having cold hands and Fields shows him a technique of getting blood back into the fingertips, which involves holding your hands above your head and then whip ping them down to your knees, a trick he learnt in the Arctic. “When you were in the Arctic?” Will Smith laughs. “I’ve never heard a black person say that.”
This is something central to Dwayne Fields’ mission. As a child in London, Fields says he never heard of black people doing things in nature or in wild spaces, and he had certainly never seen one in a kayak. He doesn’t enjoy making the next statement, but he says the only black people he heard about in the news were involved in incidents of violence. He hopes that the vision of him and Will Smith tackling these extreme scenarios in the outdoors, will inspire young people to travel and try new things.
“If people are watching me and thinking: ‘If that guy who grew up
Fields hopes that the vision of them tackling extreme scenarios will inspire young people
‘No one can stop your heart racing when you’re about to push off into fast-moving water’
round the corner from me can do it, I think I can do it too’. What this does is it introduces a new element, a new possibility, a new career path,” says Fields.
At the end of the episode, Smith and Fields are seen dragging their kayak onto the shores of a black volcanic beach. The two triumphantly slap palms and hug before dumping their rucksacks on the sand. Then they reflect on what they’ve learnt while they wait for a helicopter to come and collect them.
After the cameras shut off, Smith boards a flight back to his LA mansion. The series has taken him inside an active volcano in Vanuatu and to depths of more than 3,300ft in the Bahamas, and his fun-loving, wideeyed approach to the whole thing makes it a captivating (if acutely choreographed) watch throughout. But he has an acting career to get on with; his IMDB page lists six films to hit our screens in the coming years, and he has just released an autobiography, Will, which is out now.
But for Dwayne Fields, this foray in Iceland with a Hollywood superstar represented just another (slightly surreal) chapter in his career as a reborn adventurer. Next year he and explorer Phoebe Smith are off on a proper expedition. They will guide 10 underprivileged British children on a carbon-neutral trip to Antarctica, during which they will conduct scientific experiments feeding into Nasa research on climate change.
“It is for young people, whose teacher said the best they could ever achieve is a short prison sentence, who didn’t think they’d amount to anything,” says Fields.
“The aim of the trip is to show them that it doesn’t matter where you’re from. You can make a difference.”