David Holmes: The Boy Who Lived and the state of stunt work

A new HBO documentary, David Holmes: The Boy Who Lived, explores the special bond between actor Daniel Radcliffe and his Harry Potter stunt double David Holmes, who was paralyzed in an on-set accident in 2011.

Host Elamin Abdelmahmoud speaks with veteran stunt coordinator Kirk Caouette and actor/podcaster Carolina Bartczak about their thoughts on the film, and how the highly specialized field of stunt work has changed over the course of their careers.

We've included some highlights below, edited for length and clarity. For the full discussion, listen and follow the Commotion with Elamin Abdelmahmoud podcast, on your favourite podcast player.

LISTEN | Today's episode on YouTube:

Elamin: Kirk, you've been doing this for 25 years. You've seen the industry change. How has it changed over that period of time?

Kirk: Well, stunt performing came out of the Hollywood Western. Generally speaking, it was cowboys, rodeo people — somebody on set that could ride a horse for, like, John Wayne, because he couldn't ride a horse and nobody knew that, so he had a horse-riding double.

That lineage in North America very much came out of the cowboy rodeo mentality, and that mentality continued really up until my career started in the '90s, and has slowly faded since then. Now, with my generation running more of the shows, we don't have that kind of mentality. We do care more about people's brain injuries and things like that.

Elamin: What you're saying is before, there was a sort of the cowboy mentality — which is to say just kind of endure everything, over the safety of performers. Have you seen safety change in that period of time?

Kirk: Well, we still have accidents. We're still learning as we go. But I think overall, the joke used to be, "Make sure you land on your head so you don't hurt nothing, kid." And it was true back then, until we learned that if you land in your head too many times, it's a really bad thing.

Elamin: Carolina, I want to bring you in here. When you started landing roles, what was your understanding of what stunt work is and how do you think your perspective has changed?

Carolina: I probably didn't know that much right off the top; I just assumed someone would take care of it. As I've progressed, at first I wanted to be tough and do the stunts — the little fights, getting knocked over or falling, that kind of stuff. But you realize very quickly that that's not very practical. I can fall once. I can't fall 25 times. And that speaks to the athleticism and the professionalism of stunt people, is that they can fall, make it look really real and painful — but then they'll do it 25 more times because we have to get it from every angle. So they know how to fall to protect themselves.

Also, from an actor's perspective, it's not practical because if I break my arm, I can't work for the next eight months. Even if there's a job for a broken arm actor, I won't get it. So you have to be really careful about protecting yourself and making sure that you're not going to injure yourself and it's not going to hinder your potential for earning money.

Elamin: Kirk, let's talk about Daniel Radcliffe's stunt double. His name is David Holmes. He was paralyzed on the set of Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows: Part One…. You're a stunt worker. You're watching this movie. What aspects of the movie resonated with you?

Kirk: Well, the kid's story was similar to a lot of ours. I started in my early 20s, full time. I've been on the equipment that caused his injuries. [It] is one of the most dangerous things that we do. They're called ratchets.… I've done hundreds or thousands of ratchet pulls. They were really big at the height of my performing career.

It's very dangerous because once you press the button, if anything's been rigged wrong — and sometimes if it's been rigged right, if you have a little bit more load on the cable it can change the way that the body moves — there's no stopping it once it starts. We're phasing out these ratchets as much as we can. I think this Harry Potter incident was one of the reasons. But we've just had so many ratchets go wrong over the years that it's nice not to be able to have to use them anymore as much as we used to.

WATCH | Official trailer for David Holmes: The Boy Who Lived:

Elamin: Carolina, what was on your mind as you were watching the movie?

Carolina: I kept thinking that this wasn't even a movie about stunt performers. This David Holmes character, what an amazing human being. He approached his life with so much passion. He approached working on the films with such passion that you could see that he probably spent every minute of his waking day on the set around these actors, because he wanted to be there and he loved it so much. And his physicality was unbelievable, all the different things that he could do with his body…. Daniel Radcliffe kept saying, "I wanted to be a stuntman." And you get that feeling when you're watching David Holmes, you're like, "I want to be able to do that." And so it was really heartbreaking to watch him go through his journey. I also found that Daniel Radcliffe seems like a really nice guy.

Elamin: They have such a lovely tenderness together, don't they?

Carolina: They really did. Watching him grow up from such a young boy into a man, and how much love and commitment he has for David Holmes was really nice to see. 

You can listen to the full discussion from today's show on CBC Listen or on our podcast, Commotion with Elamin Abdelmahmoud, available wherever you get your podcasts.

Panel produced by Stuart Berman.