Daniel Radcliffe and His ‘Harry Potter’ Stunt Double Wrestle With Tragic Set Accident in Emotional Doc ‘David Holmes: The Boy Who Lived’: TV Review
variety.comAlison Herman TV Critic For the actor Daniel Radcliffe, Harry Potter was the role of a lifetime. Over eight movies and a decade that spanned his entire adolescence, Radcliffe became the world-famous face of the bespectacled boy wizard.
While the franchise, now set to retell the core story as a TV show with a brand-new cast, continued on without him, Radcliffe’s early success gave him the freedom to pursue quirkier parts like a farting corpse or Weird Al Yankovic.
For stuntman David Holmes, Harry Potter also changed his life — in equally irrevocable, yet more complicated ways. In January 2009, while filming a scene for “Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows – Part 1” as Radcliffe’s double, Holmes broke his neck, an injury that left him permanently paralyzed.
Radcliffe and Holmes were friends on set and have remained close ever since, a relationship that forms the core of the new HBO documentary “David Holmes: The Boy Who Lived.” “Harry Potter’s a big thing for a lot of people, and nobody knows what happened to me,” Holmes says early on in “The Boy Who Lived,” which both Holmes and Radcliffe executive produced alongside director Dan Hartley. “This is the story that matters the most to me from ‘Potter,’” Radcliffe says near the film’s end.
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