1 week Ago By Anna Bonet
In 2010, during the filming of the seventh Harry Potter film, the Deathly Hallows Part One , Daniel Radcliffe’s stuntman David Holmes fell suddenly from a great height. He collided, he writes in his memoir, “with a crash mat at an incredible velocity, leaving me with fractured C6 and C7 vertebrae”. In an instant, he became quadriplegic, paralysed from the chest down, and confined to a wheelchair.
He was 28. Even worse – if such a thing can be conceived – it later transpired that the condition was likely to be degenerative. “My working limbs will fade in strength over time, and as well as losing the use of my arms, there is a very real chance that I’ll need mechanical assistance to perform the functions of reading, speaking and eating.
So,” he writes conclusively, “f**k my life, right?” Not quite, no. It is a fact of memoirs such as this that there is indeed hope, no matter how distant the glimmer. The Boy Who Lived, while by its very nature terribly distressing, also reveals the indefatigable spirit of the human spirit.
Specifically, his . David Holmes was a young man who wanted to burn bright, but whose appetite for destruction was, shall we say, always pronounced. “For the outside world,” he writes, “the average stuntman probably looks like a reckless lunatic, with very little concern for their personal safety.
” But what he’s at pains to make clear here is that the world of film stunts is highly regulated, and, to all intents and purposes, “safe”. So when things do go wrong, it’s devastating for all concerned. Read Next My Luna Lovegood audition lasted six seconds but it was a Harry Potter fan's dream The Boy Who Lived essentially expands upon the 2023 Sky documentary of the same name, and serves to fill in the gaps for anyone that might crave more granular detail.
We learn that he was born in Essex , and had a hard time at school. He was small for his age, and the victim of bullying, before going on to become a gymnast, and later a stuntman. It was here on film sets that he felt like he truly belonged.
By the time he’d landed his recurring gig on the Harry Potter franchise, occasionally earning up to £11,000 per day, he was living out his dream (“I’m probably the first person on Earth to play Quidditch,” he notes). The accident put paid to that dream. Ample compensation allowed him both to build a specially adapted house “worthy of Grand Designs”, and to continue indulging in what was pretty much a rock ‘n’ roll lifestyle .
As he was not processing his accident particularly well, he sought to keep depression at bay by imbibing “as many mind-altering substances this side of heroin and crack cocaine” as he could, “determined to keep the buzz going.” Whenever Daniel Radcliffe, a close friend, visited, they’d enjoy a “cheeky cigarette”. Elsewhere, he went on lads’ holidays to Ibiza, and discovered he made for the ideal drug mule because “who’d search someone in a wheelchair?” On one holiday, he splashed out on sushi that came served on the flank of a naked woman, while on another he paid £2,500 for a Russian prostitute he could only cuddle.
Clearly mindful that such unedifying recollections are mounting up here, his ghostwriter Matt Allen then clearly steers him towards keeping the reader on side. “I could have done better,” Holmes abruptly concedes. “These days I work bloody hard to make sure I do.
” Indeed, much of the book concerns a man who never really took stock belatedly taking stock. “When I recall these stories now, I see myself for what I was back then – a scared little boy,” he writes. “I was fearful of being alone, and I was trying to hold on to every aspect of my masculinity.
I’ve since learned a lesson: what makes you a man above all other things is accountability.” Today, Holmes, 42, still boasts a vigourous lust for life, irrespective of the circumstances in which he now faces it. He has a podcast, Cunning Stunts , and remains not shy, and hardly retiring.
The fact that he has found hope is what makes his story so very inspirational. Published by Hodder and Stoughton, £22.
