Secrets of the Penguins’ most jaw-dropping moment went viral a year ago, with extraordinary footage of a huge pack of months-old emperor penguins base-jumping 50ft from an ice shelf into the Southern Ocean. It’s the sort of astonishing, uncanny footage that would win the show a Bafta were it on BBC One and hosted by a certain nonagenarian. Yet viewers of the Disney+ series are just as likely to be captivated by the story of one chick in particular, a tiny little hatchling who is surely not going to survive the young penguins’ perilous, parentless march to the sea.
What makes its journey more extraordinary is the reaction of the man capturing it, the adventurer and wildlife film-maker Bertie Gregory. There is none of the naturalist’s cool detachment here – Gregory is like the viewer at home, emotionally involved and willing the little chick to keep up with his far larger companions. He looks crestfallen as it is left behind by the colony. And when Gregory then finds another small chick, dead after a fierce overnight storm, he is visibly moved.
“You’re taught as a wildlife cameraperson not to get emotionally attached,” says Gregory. “I think that’s a bad way to operate. Emotional attachment is good, it motivates me to keep going. If you’re following these animals, you really get to know them. You say, ‘I’m filming emperor penguins’. No. I’m filming individuals. And they all have different personalities. When I saw that tiddler, I knew we had our character.”
The three-part series, made by National Geographic, exec-produced by James Cameron and bafflingly narrated by Blake Lively, is as good as natural history film-making gets, with the cameras following penguins in Antarctica and on the Galapagos Islands, recording behaviours never captured before – including adult emperor penguins using a lump of ice to rehearse passing an egg to each other, as well as that stunning cliff-diving sequence. At the heart of it is the ebullient 31-year-old Englishman Gregory, a fiercely impressive character who already has his own Disney+ series, Epic Adventures with Bertie Gregory, and a Bafta award to his name.
The Secrets shoot involved two-and-a-half months of camping on the Antarctic ice, with the sun never setting the whole time, and only a handful of crew (and thousands of penguins) to keep Gregory company. “The shoot involved diving, so you get very cold in the water, and not having somewhere to warm up is pretty brutal. The only way of showering was with a bucket, and it was always cold. I probably shouldn’t be sharing this with you but I didn’t shower for 51 days. My all-time personal record.”
Gregory is keen to sing the praises of the rest of the crew, including polar safety expert Steve Webster, and the second-unit filming team, who spent 274 days in Antarctica, stretching over the sunless winter. He is also keen to point out that the freezing conditions mean that you don’t really smell: “Until you defrost when you go home.”
Gregory admits that he was “daunted” about making a programme called Secrets of the Penguins, given how well-photographed and studied the birds are, but says even he was surprised when he witnessed the chick’s journey. “I thought I knew penguins. I was so wrong. Every time I thought they had hit their limit, they just found a way [to go beyond it].” He thinks that audiences will be surprised too.
“Penguins are similar to us. And not just the fact they walk upright and wear little tuxedos, but they have these amazing bonds. The emperor penguin chicks form friendships, literal friendships. It’s not a stretch to say that, and it’s these bonds that allow them to survive when their parents have abandoned them. They’re not an animal that’s credited with any kind of emotional intelligence, but they form bonds, they gain confidence from each other. It was really moving to witness.”
However, the modern wildlife film-maker cannot merely capture amazing or moving footage of the animal kingdom. Does Gregory consider it his role to educate people about the dangers of climate change too? “I see it as my duty,” he says. “Not only to get people interested in animals, but in the challenges they face, and to get some behavioural changes from humans. All species of penguin are in trouble.
“What’s moving about the emperor penguins is that they are one of very few animals whose only threat is climate change. In most places, there is something else – poaching, deforestation, overfishing. But emperor penguins’ lives are intertwined with the break-up of the sea ice. It’s up to us [to help them]. But we shouldn’t look after penguins just because it makes us feel warm and fuzzy inside – they’re also proof that an ecosystem is healthy or not.”
Furthermore, his thoughts on well-known celebrities narrating nature series such as his (other recent examples include Tom Hanks for the BBC, Tom Hardy for Sky and Megan Markle also for Disney+) add another layer of engagement. “It’s an exciting opportunity to combine pop culture with wildlife film. There’s a whole audience that we never touch, and anything we can do to get those people to watch it, I am all for it.”
Gregory grew up in the less exotic environs of Reading, one of four boys, and gained his love of the outdoors from his watersport-loving parents, who are both doctors. When he was 10 he began exploring the network of farmers’ fields near his house, becoming “obsessed” with the local fauna. “Badgers, foxes, roe deer, kingfishers, nothing glamorous. But I began to realise that all these animals had amazing dramas every day, and everyone else was just walking past them.”
Soon Gregory would spend all his time outdoors, even missing his friends’ birthday parties to “lie in a muddy puddle” to spot animals. As a teenager, he found that taking a camera with him would help explain his “weird” obsession, something which expanded to him winning Youth Outdoor Photographer of the Year.
During university – First Class Honours in zoology at the University of Bristol – Gregory was impatient to get going, and spent time on Vancouver Island assisting a wildlife guide and learning how to track bears. A fortuitous meeting at a photography event in London with Steve Winter – the “David Beckham of wildlife photography,” says Gregory – led to his first gig, assisting Winter on a National Geographic assignment in South Africa.
Ten years on and Gregory is an enormously respected, well-travelled cinematographer and wildlife film-maker, the recipient of the 2025 National Geographic Explorer of the Year award, and a Bafta award-winner for his camera work on the David Attenborough series Seven Worlds, One Planet.
“People always say you should never meet your heroes,” he says. “Those people have not met Sir David Attenborough. He is exactly how you would expect him to be and how you would want him to be. It was magic working with him. What a cool dude.”
Attenborough turns 99 next month and every wildlife presenter, film-maker and cameraperson in the UK is inevitably viewed through the lens of “The Next Attenborough”. Gregory couldn’t be a more prime candidate. He is passionate, well-spoken, genial, intelligent, presentable and natural in front of the camera (ideal son-in-law material, apart from the fact he spends so little time in his actual home in Bristol). “I can see where you’re going with this,” says Gregory, firmly but kindly, before I can finish my question.
“He’s irreplaceable. Talking about who’s going to follow Sir David is the wrong angle to come at it from. His life and his contribution, not just to natural history but to television as well. I would also like to point out that he is very much still going.” Point taken. However, if the public-service broadcasters aren’t watching Gregory’s career with keen interest, they are missing a trick.
Is there a secret to Gregory’s precocious success? Does he have a USP that puts him above the competition? “I guess one of my personality traits is that I’m pretty relentless, pretty persistent. That’s how you capture unique behaviour. You need passion and persistence to see it. Everyone says you need patience to be a wildlife film-maker. That’s bollocks, you need passion and persistence.”
Gregory’s passion and persistence are a perfect fit for wildlife documentaries, but it’s easy to see how a canny producer might want to see those qualities across other parts of the TV schedule. Might Gregory be tempted to follow fellow wildlife cameraman Hamza Yassin onto the Strictly dance floor? Yassin, after all, won the 2022 series. The answer is swift: “No, I’m good thanks. I’m going to focus on staying in the wild and hanging out with animals.”
All three episodes of Secrets of the Penguins are available from April 21st on Disney+ and airing on Nat Geo Wild from April 22nd