Daniel Radcliffe is executive-producing a documentary for HBO and Sky in the U.K. about his Harry Potter stunt double, David Holmes, who was paralyzed while practicing a stunt for Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows: Part 1 in 2009. 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 since the age of 14, up until his accident on the set of the penultimate Harry Potter film. Holmes had been Radcliffe’s stunt double since the first film in the series, when Radcliffe was only 11, and over the following decade they formed an “inextricable bond†that lasts to this day. In 2020, they began a podcast Cunning Stunts.
After Holmes’s accident in 2009, Radcliffe hosted a charity auction to raise money for his medical bills and visited him in the hospital along with Tom Felton. “I’ve got a relationship that goes back many, many years with Dave,†Radcliffe told The Mirror in 2014. “And I would hate for people to just see me and Dave and go, ‘Oh, there’s Daniel Radcliffe with a person in a wheelchair’ because I would never, even for a moment, want them to assume that Dave was anything except for an incredibly important person in my life.â€
The trailer and press release tease behind-the-scenes footage from Holmes’s stunt work as well as “intimate interviews with David, Daniel Radcliffe, friends, family, and former crew†and inspirational themes about “living with adversity, growing up, forging identities in an uncertain world, and the bonds that bind us together and lift us up.†David Holmes: The Boy Who Lived premieres on HBO and Max on Wednesday, November 15, at 9 p.m.
This post has been updated.