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, “s.