The Accident that Changed the ‘Harry Potter’ Filmmakers’ Lives Forever

Photograph courtesy of HBO

The Harry Potter film series reached its conclusion back in 2011, but remains a fount of nostalgic content. In 2022, the cast and filmmakers reunited for an HBO Max special full of warm reminiscing.

But one story from the set doesn't get told as frequently. While prepping for one of the final installments in 2010, David Holmes—the stunt double for Potter star Daniel Radcliffe—was flung against a wall and broke his neck, an accident that resulted in near-total paralysis.

Now that element of the Harry Potter legacy is being explored in the documentary David Holmes: The Boy Who Lived, streaming on Max beginning Wednesday. And yet for Holmes himself, director Dan Hartley, and Radcliffe (who serves as executive producer and appears in the film), the intention is not to make any fans have negative feelings about their beloved franchise.

Holmes knows what movies can mean to people. When he went through a series of surgeries in 2019 he projected his favorites—not Potter; he's a Lord of the Rings man—onto the ceiling because he could not move his head.

"Obviously breaking your neck is not the most positive story to be associated with those films, but hopefully in sharing my story you're seeing me to be able to overcome the horror with the humor," Holmes says, during an interview with Radcliffe and Hartley in a New York hotel. "It's taught me to be present. We're given the gift of life. We have to make our peace with the fact that it's going to take all the things you love on the way out. I learned that lesson at 25."

And despite the tragedy at the doc's center, The Boy Who Lived does play as a celebration of the Potter films, but not in the traditional way. More often than not, it's a tribute to the work of stunt performers in general, and the influence they can have over an entire set. To Radcliffe, stunt people like Holmes were the cool older kids who took him under his wing and made him feel like they were his brothers. "These were the guys that were there every day with me," Radcliffe says. "We were together all the time. These are some of really the key relationships from on set and the years since."

The Boy Who Lived actually started as even more of an outright exploration of stunt work at large. Radcliffe explains he had been wanting to make something with Holmes for a long time, and he initially filmed some interviews related to Cunning Stunts, Holmes' podcast about stunt performers. "I was kind of like, I don't know if this is any good," Radcliffe remembers.

So he showed the footage to Hartley, who had worked in the second unit on Potter. "He very kindly was like, We should do all of this again," Radcliffe says. Hartley also suggested reframing the project around Holmes, which involved some convincing.

"If I'm setting myself on fire for 15 seconds, all day long, that's fine, that's my sweet spot," Holmes says. "But to actually be the main feature of a big project like this was pretty daunting, but hopefully these guys got the best of me."

While Radcliffe and Hartley started developing the project independently, it eventually came to be produced by HBO Documentary Films, a corporate sibling of Warner Bros., which released the Potter films. Radcliffe says he was ready for more notes than they ended up receiving, and they were able to access the footage they wanted, including that of Holmes' accident, although the film never shows it in full.

The production also offered an opportunity for Radcliffe and others who worked on Potter to process what happened to Holmes in a way they had not been afforded previously when they had simply gone back to work. Marc Mailley, another stuntman, breaks down when discussing how difficult it was to replace Holmes, even on Holmes' own request. Another sequence hones in on the regrets of veteran stunt coordinator Greg Powell.

"We all had that moment of realizing that we had never en masse talked about it," Radcliffe says, adding that the documentary was "genuinely cathartic and all of us realize that like, oh, maybe we should have all had therapy or something after this."

It sounds trite to say, but on screen and in person, Holmes speaks with remarkable perspective on his experience. He bears no ill will toward the Potter films nor toward the nature of the stunt business, which he continues to obsess over as an advocate for a stunt ensemble Oscar.

"The thing I learned most about my journey is what is it to be a man in the 21st Century?" he says. "And for a long time I've never found that, and now I understand that it is accountability for who you are and the person you project out to the world."

Originally Appeared on GQ