The gift Daniel Radcliffe's 'Harry Potter' stunt double David Holmes finds in paralysis

David Holmes wears a wide smile during an interview as if he’s won the lottery. And maybe in the world of stunt performers he did have the winning ticket, at least for a little while.

At 17, the venturesome Essex, England, native was hired as the lead stunt double for “Harry Potter” star Daniel Radcliffe in the movie franchise that began bewitching audiences in 2001. As Holmes coached Radcliffe, then 11, in sword-fighting and gymnastics on the first of eight films, the two became friends. But Holmes’ broom-flying days ended in 2009, when he was paralyzed while performing a stunt for “Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows: Part 1.”

The injury and rehabilitation is detailed in HBO’s documentary “David Holmes: The Boy Who Lived” (Wednesday, 9 EST/PST and streaming on Max).

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For the stunt, in which a snake thrusts Harry through a wall, Holmes was attached to a cable and yanked back with force so great it broke his neck.

“He smashed into the wall,” stuntman Marc Mailley recalls in the documentary. “And now he’s just hanging there like a puppet with his strings cut.”

Holmes spent a week after his accident wallowing in self-pity, but seeing his pain reflected “in my loved ones’ eyes was the hardest of things,” he says. “It hurt me more. It makes it harder.”

Instead of being bitter, he's opted to be grateful for even the smallest things, like witnessing golden light bathe the trees of Central Park. “New York in autumn,” he says. “There's reasons why people write songs about it.”

But Holmes hesitated when asked to be at the center of a documentary, says Radcliffe, an executive producer. However, Radcliffe felt strongly about sharing the story of his friend with the world, “what he did for the films, what he gave for the films,” he says in an interview.

“This is the most meaningful relationship for me to come out of ‘Potter,’” Radcliffe says. “This film's an incredible portrait of Dave, and it's also a very specific little window into some behind-the-scenes stuff from the movies and what it was like to grow up together on those movies, and why we are all still so close in the way that we are.”

Radcliffe is featured in the documentary along with Mailley, who replaced Holmes as Radcliffe's stunt double following the accident, and stunt performer Tolga Kenan. Dan Hartley, a video assistant operator for the franchise, directs. Radcliffe says revisiting the incident on camera allowed him to process it in a way he hadn’t before.

“We realized through making it that we had never actually sat down and talked about what happened in the years since,” he says. “We'd all kind of been trying to deal with it in various ways, but at no point did we sit down and talk until this documentary. So on a personal level, it was very cathartic and good for all of us to have made it.”

Holmes finds comfort in knowing “that my legacy on film is not me hitting that wall 14½ years ago,” he says. “In life, I've learned that you're either a survivor or victim, and I choose to be a survivor. Hopefully these guys have captured that, and … it will give a perspective to lots of other people that are going through hard times right now.”

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The incident left Holmes unable to walk, and a cyst in his spinal cord that developed after surgery threatens his current mobility. He leans on wisecracking and his family, friends, and caregivers to cope.

“It takes a village to survive a spinal cord injury,” Holmes says. “These guys are the legs and arms that I don't have.”

“Any moment spent with Dave, the humor is never far away,” says Hartley.

Holmes tries not focus on the loss of movement. “Even though it's a curse what I live with, it gave me that gift (of being present), and I see it as a superpower,” he says. “I say we're all survivors. Life’s hard, but we're given this gift. We've got to make our peace with the things that it will take away from us.”

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