Who Are the Skywalkers? Rooftopping, Netflix Fame and Its Real Cost

Before the Empire State Building, before the arrest, there were about a dozen years of climbing towers nobody had permission to climb.

Ivan Kuznetsov and Angelina Nikolau — publicly, Ivan "Vanya" Beerkus and Angela Nikolau — are Russian nationals in their early thirties, listed at an address in East Orange, New Jersey. They are among the best-known figures in rooftopping, a subculture that produced a Netflix documentary, an international audience, and a body count.

This piece is about who they are and what they do. The July 2026 Empire State Building climb and the eight charges that followed are covered separately.

A note on their names

Coverage of the couple is inconsistent, which makes searching for them confusing. Both versions are correct, in different contexts:

	Legal / court records	Public and social media
Him	Ivan Kuznetsov, 32	Ivan "Vanya" Beerkus
Her	Angelina Nikolau, 33	Angela Nikolau

What rooftopping actually is

Rooftopping is climbing tall structures — skyscrapers, cranes, antennas, bridges — usually without permission and usually without ropes, to photograph and film the result. It emerged in Russia and Ukraine in the early 2010s and spread through Instagram, where the images work precisely because the viewer can see there is no safety equipment.

Three things define it, and each one is a risk:

No ropes. The absence of a harness is the aesthetic. It is also why a slip is fatal rather than frightening.
No permission. Access is gained by hiding, disguise, lock-breaking or waiting out security — which is trespass, and often more than trespass.
Documentation is the point. Unlike free solo rock climbing, the climb exists to produce an image. That creates pressure toward more recognisable buildings and more extreme positions over time.

Merdeka 118: the climb that made them

In late December 2022, the pair climbed Merdeka 118 in Kuala Lumpur. At 678.9 metres (2,227 feet) to its architectural top and 680.5 metres to tip, it is the second-tallest building in the world, behind only the Burj Khalifa. It had been completed roughly a year earlier and opened to the public in January 2024.

The access, by Nikolau's own account: she disguised herself in a hijab and a builder's uniform. After being spotted, she hid in a small concrete box for over twenty hours with no food, water or bathroom. The full operation ran about twenty-five hours.

Malaysian police opened a trespassing investigation and said they had no record of the pair entering or leaving the country. No charges have been confirmed.

The Netflix film

That climb became Skywalkers: A Love Story, directed by Jeff Zimbalist with co-director Maria Bukhonina. It premiered at Sundance in January 2024, screened at Tribeca, and was released on Netflix on 19 July 2024.

The film is what moved them from a niche Instagram following to a global audience — and it is worth being clear about the mechanism. A streaming documentary that frames illegal, potentially lethal climbing as a love story is not neutral coverage. It is a distribution deal that rewards escalation, and the Empire State Building climb came two years after it. Netflix has not commented publicly on that climb.

Other incidents — and how solid they are

A lot of what circulates about the couple comes from their own social media rather than any official record. That distinction matters:

Claim	How well sourced
Merdeka 118 climb, Dec 2022, 20-hour hide	Well documented — film, press interviews, Malaysian police statement
Empire State Building, 1 July 2026	Court record — NYPD arrest, DA complaint, arraignment
"In trouble for kissing on a spire in China"	Their own account only — a social post referenced by CBS New York. No official record.
Miami rooftops	Passing mention only. No arrest record found.
A Paris arrest	Unverified. Appears only in aggregator blogs. Treat as false until sourced.

The part the love story leaves out

Rooftopping kills people. Not hypothetically.

Wu Yongning, one of China's most-followed rooftoppers, fell to his death from a Changsha high-rise in November 2017. He was 26. The fall was captured on his own camera.
Rémi Lucidi, a 30-year-old French climber known for photographing himself on towers worldwide, fell from a 68th-floor Hong Kong high-rise in late July 2023. His body was found on 31 July. Police said he "apparently fell from a rooftop."

Both had substantial followings. Both were experienced. Neither was doing anything meaningfully more dangerous than what the Skywalkers do routinely.

There is a second category of cost that gets discussed even less: the people who have to respond. Roughly forty NYPD officers were pulled into the Empire State Building incident, three of whom climbed 1,250 feet internally to reach the pair. Every unpermitted climb of a landmark carries that tail.

How to think about them

It is possible to hold two things at once, and most coverage picks one.

The images are genuinely extraordinary, the physical skill is real, and the partnership at the centre of it is not manufactured — twelve years of this is not a stunt. Nikolau's twenty hours in a concrete box is a level of commitment most professional athletes never approach.

And: the work is built on trespass, it transfers risk onto building staff and emergency responders who did not choose it, it has a demonstrated fatality rate in its own community, and its economics reward doing something more dangerous next time. A Netflix release increased the audience; it did not reduce the danger.

The honest position is not "fearless artists" and not "reckless criminals". It is that a subculture optimised for escalation, given a global distribution deal, will escalate — and the question is what happens on the climb after the one that got them arrested.

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