Will Pike
๐ค SpeakerAppearances Over Time
Podcast Appearances
That first job on the 1998 science fiction film Lost in Space.
It launched his career as a stuntman at just 14 years of age.
A few years later, a new film was being made.
The story of a wizard.
The production needed to know how they were going to film Quidditch.
Holmes was asked to do a broomstick test for director Chris Columbus.
Rigged to the back of a truck, sitting on a broom, towed down a runway...
Columbus liked what he saw.
When Daniel Radcliffe was cast as Harry Potter, David Holmes was hired as his stunt double.
He would go on to perform in the first six films of the most successful fantasy franchise in cinema history.
One day flying Harry's Nimbus 2000 broomstick, the next saving Hermione from a troll or battling Voldemort.
He described it simply as the best job in the world.
Over ten years, he and Daniel Radcliffe would form a close and lasting friendship, two young men whose lives had become inextricably linked by one of the most beloved stories ever told.
In January of 2009, while rehearsing a stunt sequence for Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows, Holmes was hurled into a wall and broke his neck.
It would leave him permanently paralysed from the chest down.
He was 28 years old.
And I think that there's an element like disability often gets referred to as something like inspiration porn.
You know, where people are like, oh my God, my neighbor across the street is so inspiring.
He's got cerebral palsy and he just inspires me to go to the gym every day.