Radcliffe and Holmes Photo: John Wilson/HBO
Daniel Radcliffe is executive producing a documentary for HBO and Sky in the UK about his Harry Potter stunt double David Holmes, who was paralyzed in 2009 while practicing a stunt for Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows: Part 1. David Holmes: The Boy Who Lived is described as a “coming-of-age story” about Holmes, a trained gymnast who had worked as a body double from the age of 14 until his accident on the set of the penultimate Harry Potter -Films. Holmes had been Radcliffe’s stunt double since the first film in the series, when Radcliffe was just 11 years old, and over the following decade they formed an “inseparable bond” that continues to this day. In 2020, they started a podcast “Cunning Stunts”.
After Holmes’ accident in 2009, Radcliffe held a charity auction to raise money for his medical bills and visited him in the hospital with Tom Felton. “I have a relationship with Dave that goes back many, many years,” Radcliffe told The Mirror in 2014. “And I would hate for people to just see me and Dave and say, ‘Oh, there’s Daniel Radcliffe with a person in a wheelchair’, because I would never, not even for a moment, want to that they assume Dave was anything other than an incredibly important person in my life.”
The press release features behind-the-scenes footage of Holmes’ stunt work as well as “intimate interviews with David, Daniel Radcliffe, friends, family and former crew members” and inspiring themes about “living with adversity, growing up, finding identity in an uncertain world and the bonds that bind us stand together and rise.” David Holmes: The Boy Who Lived premieres Wednesday, November 15, at 9 p.m. on HBO and Max