‘If I could squeeze your hand right now, I would. Life’s shit, right?” David Holmes is in hospital, where he has been admitted countless times since being paralysed in an accident 14 years ago. The spinal injury that took away the use of his legs subsequently caused him to lose feeling in his right arm, and he is profoundly worried that the same is happening to the left arm, which a nurse is massaging. But he is more worried about the nurse: he knows she recently lost a friend to Covid, because he took the time to ask.
Holmes, now 40, was Daniel Radcliffe’s stunt double on the Harry Potter movies until he broke his neck during the filming of Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows Part 1. On the surface, David Holmes: The Boy Who Lived is another of those documentaries where someone who has experienced a grave misfortune inspires everyone around them with their determination, selflessness and charity work. But it ends up as something tougher and heavier: a frank reckoning of a life – of several lives – remodelled by trauma.
First, we remember the extraordinary good times, when a short kid from Essex found his way, via youth gymnastics, to movie stunt work. Holmes was a few years older than Radcliffe when they began work on the Potter franchise, so he became a cross between an elder brother and a personal trainer, schooling Radcliffe on how to make his physical work more convincing, while also teaching him and everyone in earshot how to enjoy life to the maximum by hurling yourself at it at full speed. The side-by-side footage of Holmes performing a stunt, then Radcliffe doing a safer version of it, is a fascinating insight into how action sequences come together.
Then, catastrophe descends. We see Holmes in a wired harness, ready to be jerked back into a padded wall by a weighted pulley that will turn out to have too much weight on it. Just as the device is activated, the screen cuts to black – and, as Holmes starts his new life, the film properly begins. The heroically upbeat Holmes is shown a day or two after the accident in his hospital bed, devising games for himself and a pale, boyish-looking Radcliffe to keep spirits high. In the present day, he sets out a philosophy of positivity and engagement that produces several lovely moments, such as the one with the nurse.
But the film is also about Holmes’s friendships. Radcliffe is open and articulate on the challenges of rebuilding a relationship when the shared experience it has been built on has not just been brought to an abrupt end, but has been tainted too. “What if it never feels normal again?” Radcliffe says, recalling his thoughts during those early visits, when he had to be positive without being blase, both acknowledging and pushing past the thing everyone in the room wished they did not have to think about. Those times are, Radcliffe says, becoming tearful, “when life is just about being there for people, not about fixing anything”.
Just being there for loved ones in dire straits can, however, be hard. Some of the film’s most affecting scenes are interviews with stunt coordinator Greg Powell, who was in charge on the day Holmes broke his neck, and finds it difficult to be around him. Powell’s visit to Holmes’s house, which we learn is not a frequent occurrence, is full of tender awkwardness and apologies unspoken but accepted. Outside, with the film’s director Dan Hartley, the gruff, cigar-chomping Powell breaks down, the guilt and grief pouring out. “I wish I’d never met him,” he says of someone he clearly loves like a son. “I fucked his life right up. He’d have been doing anything he liked now.”
This emotionally intelligent film tracks the ripples of Holmes’s injury in every direction. Radcliffe and Holmes both say they didn’t appreciate how disturbing it was for junior Potter stuntman Marc Mailley to “put on the glasses” and take over for the rest of the Deathly Hallows shoot. But The Boy Who Lived finds comfort in how friends cope when one of the team falls down, and it has the wisdom to recognise that the person who is supposed to need looking after often ends up caring for everyone else.
A scene near the end shows Holmes, Radcliffe, Mailley and another Potter colleague, Tolga Kenan, facing together the prospect of Holmes’s paralysis worsening. He leads them through it, helping them with their ongoing mourning process despite being the person they are mourning. He makes sure they are all right. This film is not short of reasons to be impressed by Holmes, but that kindness might be the most precious.
• David Holmes: The Boy Who Lived is on Sky Documentaries and Now
