Harry Potter behind the scenes, by the stunt double who was left paralysed for life
Harry Potter was not the first boy to play quidditch. Nor was Daniel Radcliffe. That honour goes to David Holmes, Radcliffe’s stunt double, whose bottom was plonked on a Nimbus 2000 broomstick in September 2000 (incredibly uncomfortable, apparently) while he zoomed about, watched by a sinister Severus Snape, a headmasterly Dumbledore and the assembled pupils of Hogwarts. Later, in Harry Potter And The Chamber Of Secrets, Holmes was swiped sideways through the air by the Whomping Willow, and you can see him too making a spectacular deep dive in the fourth Harry Potter film, when Harry rescues Ron from the bottom of the Black Lake. In short, anything that was too technically difficult for Daniel Radcliffe to do – pretty much everything, since the real-life boy-wizard turned out to have ‘the co-ordination of a mountain troll’ – was done by Holmes.
More often than not it would be David Holmes flying Harry’s broomsticks
Stunts – known as ‘gags’ in the business – aren’t just technically tricky, they are potentially deadly. Even with Holmes’s years of training as an elite athlete (he was a gymnast), there was no guarantee that something couldn’t go horribly wrong. Which is exactly what happened in January 2009 during rehearsals for a scene in which Holmes was tasked with creating Harry’s showdown with Voldemort’s pet serpent, Nagini. Strapped into a harness, he was meant to fly backwards across the set of Godric’s Hollow before landing against a bank of crashmats. It would hurt for sure, but nothing that the proudly self-described ‘pain-magnet’ couldn’t handle. But that day there was a glitch and Holmes smashed into the wall at an awkward angle. The last thing he remembers is the sickening crack of his spine. He would never walk again.
Actually, explains Holmes in this extraordinary memoir, not walking again turned out to be the least of his losses. As a quadriplegic with no feeling below his chest, he will never again have a bowel movement unaided, or an orgasm that isn’t excruciatingly painful and potentially fatal. Unable to regulate his temperature, there is always the danger that he will have a stroke on an aeroplane or even just sitting in the sun. Worst of all, doctors have told him that his body will continue to deteriorate. At some point his breathing will go, followed by his swallow reflex. Even now he is dependent on round-the-clock care. During Covid, worried that his helpers might be prevented from staying with him, he kept a sheet of diazepam by the bed to bring his life to a swift close.
Daniel and David keep in touch to this day
The Boy Who Lived is so much more than a disability memoir, though. It also offers a rare peek into the secret world of stunt actors. It is secret for sound commercial reasons: the success of the Harry Potter franchise depended on the audience believing that it really is Harry, Hermione and Ron flying on the back of a hippogriff or diving into the deep.
Not that Holmes would ever have dreamt of complaining: his pleasure in pushing his body to the limit far outweighed any desire to be globally famous. As David saw it, he got all the advantages of playing Harry Potter and none of the downsides.
And then there was the money, too. One day, for a particularly tricky gag, Holmes earned £11,000. His first royalty cheque was for £65,000, extraordinary for a boy who had just turned 18. And as an Essex-born lad, he loved the blokey atmosphere. Once, on location, he drunkenly caused £30,000 damage in a posh hotel when he left the taps running. The film’s high-ups stepped in to hush it up.
This memoir isn’t all about stunt men behaving badly. Holmes supplies wonderful pen sketches of the actors whom he encountered on the Harry Potter set. There is Alan Rickman, who insists on staying in character as Severus Snape and was ‘bloody terrifying’; Maggie Smith is standoffish, refusing to be amused even when the animals on set behaved in X-rated ways (the child actors naturally sniggered). Michael Gambon keeps cigarettes in his beard, while Gary Oldman drinks endless cups of tea and natters with the cameramen. And then there is Daniel Radcliffe himself, who, although several years younger than David, became a very good friend and, later, drinking buddy. It was a stroke of luck for Holmes, who is only 5ft 2in, that Radcliffe, above, with David, never went through a teenage growth spurt. If Harry Potter had been a six-footer, Holmes would have been demoted to doubling for Hermione.
Emma Watson, Rupert Grint and Daniel Radcliffe in the third Harry Potter film
David Holmes never disguises the deranged way that he began to behave the moment he was able to leave his hospital bed, albeit in a wheelchair. With his insurance pay-off he bought shedloads of cocaine and ketamine, which he dispersed like party favours to keep people close (being left alone with his thoughts terrified him). On one occasion in Ibiza he even arranged for his friends to eat sushi off the body of a naked woman. Saddest of all, he paid £2,500 for a sex worker and then asked her for what he really wanted, which was a cuddle.
Holmes tells us these things not to shock but to show us the full range of his experience as a severely disabled man. In the last few years, though, he has gradually stopped pushing his vulnerable body into further decline and even resumed his old training schedule to build up his muscle tone and lung capacity. More than this, he has begun to reframe his ‘gags’, no longer seeing them in terms of athletic spectacle and macho endurance, but as ways of making visual magic to enchant and delight the world. Without realising it, he had been an artist all along.
These days he wants to go on being one. During Covid, Holmes’s ‘Concert for One’ initiative saw him employing musicians to perform in his garden and then beaming the results out to the lonely and isolated world on the internet.
He also donates iPads to disabled children so that they too can make art (wielding a pencil is impossible for many disabled people, including himself).
And he’s not above staging the odd ‘gag’ himself. Holmes’s author’s photograph shows him sitting naked in his wheelchair, against a backdrop of forest, with sheets of flame shooting from his head.
As a representation of the inspirational way in which he now tries to live, the image is both deeply moving and truly spectacular.