In January 2009, David Holmes’ life changed forever.
As Daniel Radcliffe's stunt double, he was on the set of Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows, preparing to do a stunt: one in which Harry is attacked by the venomous snake Nagini and gets slammed through a wall. He was hooked up to a harness for a ‘jerk back’, which was supposed to yank him backwards through the air.
Except, when the time came to execute the stunt, Holmes hit the wall too hard – and broke his neck. He was 28.
“I remember,” he says in his new documentary. “My chest folded into my nose. I was fully conscious throughout the whole thing.”
As the team rushed to detach him from his harness, one thing was immediately clear to Holmes: he was paralysed. “I can feel it,” he told his friend.
What followed was ten-plus years of recovery, operations, bad news and health relapses. But through it all, his positivity has been unwavering – and now, his story is finally being told in a new documentary from Sky and HBO.
Titled The Boy Who Lived, it’s a celebration of Holmes's life and work. It’s also a chance for him to tell us about it, on his own terms. “I never told my story. I never really wanted to,” he says. But “Harry Potter’s a big thing for a lot of people, and nobody knows what happened to me... I just thought I’d better tell my story, or it won’t be told.”
Born in 1981 (he's now 42), Holmes grew up in Essex as one of three boys. All of them were into gymnastics, but Holmes stood out – and when Harry Potter came knocking, he leapt at the chance to do it.
At just fourteen years old, he was given the role of Daniel Radcliffe’s stunt double – and formed a close friendship with the young star. "It was basically me being told, 'You get to hang out with this guy, this cool older kid, three times a week, he's going to be your friend now," Radcliffe says. "As an eleven year old, I was like, 'You are the coolest person I've ever seen.'"
“He was like my little brother at the start. And I was very fortunate enough to be his PE teacher,” Holmes tells me. We’re speaking on Zoom, and Holmes is sitting next to director Dan Hartley – another friend from his Harry Potter days, where Hartley started out as a video operator.
“We developed our relationship in the stunt stores, jumping off from Portacabins, flying around, sword [fighting], and doing boxing and all the things that the insurance company would pass out looking at us," Holmes reflects on his time with Radcliffe. "It was really important to me that he could just have a safe space to be a kid.”
It’s clear that Radcliffe hero-worshipped Holmes – at one point in the film, he confesses to wanting to be a stuntman himself for a period of his childhood. "There's a certain version of [Harry Potter] that the world wanted to see, which was the kids being best friends," he says now. "The people I was closest to are all people from the crew... some of the happiest times of my set have just been listening to stunt men tell stories to each other."
These days, Radcliffe still is one of Holmes’ best friends. He visited Holmes during his time in hospital, many times, and in recent years helped get the documentary off the ground. “He’s amazing,” Holmes says. “Every time I watch him in a film, I'm like, ‘Oh, I wish I could have done that stunt for him.’”
Clearly, Holmes loved – and loves – stuntwork. “You’re only living when you’re nearly dying,” he says towards the start of the documentary – an attitude that characterised almost his entire career.
With Harry Potter, he and his friends made a point of doing stunts bigger, better and more dangerously than ever before. “I spent three months underwater. I mean, unbelievable. Just getting webbed feet and gills put on, doing pretty much every action sequence that you see Harry do,” he says proudly. “I mean, you're talking to the official first Quidditch player in the world.”
That’s right: in addition to playing a Slytherin beater in the Philosopher’s Stone, Holmes bears the distinction of doing the first-ever broomstick ride. “It turns out getting a load of kids to jump out of an aeroplane with a broomstick between their legs is not really insurable,” he says. He’s only half-joking; this was apparently an early, hastily-scrapped idea for making the Quidditch scenes work.
“We cracked it on my first day's work in front of Chris Columbus, where they strapped me to a broomstick on the back of a truck and drove it down the runway at the studios. So yeah, that was very cool day. And that's how I secured my job.”
But of course, the job is dangerous – and the documentary pulls no punches in showing the aftermath of Holmes’ accident.
Rushed to Watford General Hospital, and then to the Royal Orthopaedic Hospital, he stayed there for six months, during which time he developed a life-threatening cyst in his spine and was told he would never fully recover. Worse, it turned out that Holmes was losing mobility in his hands and arms too; in 2019, he underwent months of operations to try and stem the decline.
“Paralysis is like a prison cell,” he says. “But for me the cell’s getting smaller and smaller until it’s like I’m stuck in a cage.”
He’s adamant that stunt performers don’t get the credit they’re due. He recently launched a podcast, Cunning Stunts, alongside Radcliffe to raise awareness of the work those in his profession do.
“In society if we don't reward the artists that take the most risks, then why have we got Picasso painting Guernica, and Banksy spraying the West Bank?” he says. “Stunt performers risk their lives and their bones and their bodies for the sake of storytelling. And yet, we still don't get a mention as a department in major award seasons and major award ceremonies.”
“It's nice to teach audiences that, you know, there is someone getting hit by a car, someone getting thrown down the stairs. And if it makes audiences more aware of that, by reflecting on the bad side of what happened in my stunt career, then we've done a good job, right?”
Now with the documentary about to be released, Holmes seems relaxed about it, despite the fact that he nearly died while making it. The cameras started rolling in 2019, before his marathon of operations that, as Hartley says, “potentially had life threatening implications.”
Though Holmes remained relentlessly positive throughout – he shared a ward with victims of terrorist attacks, which he says put things in perspective – it can’t have been easy. We see Holmes’ closest friends and family break down in tears as they speak about his accident, and their friendship. Did making the film help Holmes himself process any residual emotions?
“It helped me see my loved ones process it," he says. "Because there’s nothing harder when you're going through hardship in your life than seeing your pain in the eyes of people you love.”
“And being able to see my loved ones, my boys, my family, everybody, to be able to share their insights and their own personal journey through mine: it's helped me grow. You know, my life is extreme wavelengths: extreme highs, extreme lows. And I choose to ride the waves and surf instead of getting swept away.”
