‘Skywalkers: A love story’: What happened to Ivan Beerkus and Angela Nikolau?
And are the adrenaline junkies, now the subject of a Netflix documentary, still together?
This is the kind of story that sets audiences alight: the rise of an influencer couple who scale skyscrapers illegally to take smug kissing selfies, with a sheer drop and certain death below them. No wonder the story has made it to television.
The deranged exploits of Ivan Beerkus and Angela Nikolau have been captured in a documentary romanticising their stunts in Skywalkers: A Love Story, available to watch on Netflix now. You can watch the trailer below.
But who are the adrenaline-fuelled height-junkies and are they still together now?
The backstory
Nikolau and Beerkus are both Moscow-born “roofers” or “rooftoppers”, people who are known for sneaking into tall buildings, and scaling them without proper safety equipment.
Back in 2014, their highly risky hobby went global, when Rolling Stone published a feature on the Russian gang who were scaling buildings, with Beerkus climbing all the Stalin-era constructions topped with stars. This is when Nikolau first noticed him, she said, as he was documenting it all on his Instagram account, and clocking up plenty of followers.
Nikolau came from a family of circus performers, and trained as a gymnast and in the mid 2010s, she began climbing buildings, posing acrobatically, and taking pictures of herself.
Beerkus then reached out to Nikolau to join him in climbing Goldin Finance 117 tower in Tianjin, China in 2016. According to the Guardian, he needed to find the most extreme female rooftopper – “and the most beautiful one” for his sponsorship deal with a travel company. Nikolau said: “His text was very businesslike. But as soon as I read it, I said yes.”
She added that the couple first got together in Hong Kong: “There was a typhoon warning, but we decided to venture out, and Ivan showed me some rooftops. When we climbed up there, he took my hand and I knew.”
The duo scaled Goldin Finance in 2016, and went on to many more dizzying new heights for photoshoots together including Ping An International Finance Centre, Shenzhen (2016), King Power Mahanakhon, Bangkok (2017), Al Yaqoub Tower, Dubai (2017) and Sainte-Clotilde, Paris (2017).
As documented in the film, the pair then climbed Merdeka 118 in Kuala Lumpur in 2022, the second tallest building in the world at 679 metres tall. They managed to evade security on the building in December 2022, as it was the night of the World Cup Final, but ended up having to hide for 36 hours in the building – with no food, water, or sleep – to get to the top.
She detailed exactly how she did it on X, a couple of weeks afterwards.
Are the couple still together and what are they doing now?
According to a recent interview in the Guardian, the couple are still in a relationship, and living in Bangkok. However, on July 2, Nikolau announced that she was moving to New York, with no mention of Beerkus:
As of July 2024, it’s been 18 months since they climbed Merdeka, and they’ve had to diversify their talents: they sell NFTs of their photographs, Nikolau is an artist with a sideline in making cat-eared balaclavas and Beerkus has been making music. But they’re still planning their next sky-high adventure, Beerkus said: “We are not anticipating quitting anytime soon. Maybe when we are 75.”
