Daniel Radcliffe backs The Boy Who Lived for summer 2027 stage run
daniel radcliffe sits at the edge of a story that began in January 2009 and is now moving to the Kiln Theatre. David Holmes, his Harry Potter stunt double and close friend, has turned his accident and recovery into The Boy Who Lived, a stage play that is in development this week in Kilburn, North West London.
Kiln Theatre workshop
Paul Taylor-Mills said the play will premiere at the Kiln Theatre in summer 2027, giving the production a clear runway after two years of development. Holmes is expected to portray himself, and the workshop being held all this week will be videoed and shared with the relevant parties, including Radcliffe, with a view that he is hopefully involved.
The project carries more weight because it is built from more than one source: Dan Hartley’s 2023 HBO/Sky documentary David Holmes: The Boy Who Lived and Holmes’s own account of life before and after the accident. Holmes’s memoir was published two years ago, so the stage version is not starting from scratch; it is translating an already documented life story into live performance.
Rights from HBO and Warner Bros
The two-year development process also had to clear rights from HBO and Warner Bros and permissions from J.K. Rowling, Radcliffe, and Sue and Andy Holmes. That kind of chain matters in practical terms because the play sits inside a heavily controlled franchise world, not a free-floating personal memoir.
Taylor-Mills described Holmes and Radcliffe as “They’d been close, like brothers, and still are,” and said the show is “half stand-up comedy, half TED Talk, half My Son’s a Queer.” He also said a “Radcliffe” character in the play is “TBC, TBC. Very much to be confirmed,” which leaves the creative shape still being settled even as the workshop is underway.
Holmes after January 2009
Holmes was left paralyzed from the waist down after stunt tests for Deathly Hallows: Part One at Leavesden Studios in January 2009, then spent months undergoing several operations at the Royal National Orthopaedic Hospital. After the accident, he asked family and friends to “try and hope for me to be happy like I am, not happy like you want me to be.”
That line now sits at the center of the stage project’s appeal: the production is not trying to retell the accident as a spectacle, but to stage a life that continued after it. Summer 2027 is far enough away that the current workshop still feels like a test, but the combination of rights clearance, a named premiere window, and Holmes’s own performance plan suggests the production is already past the idea stage and into the business of getting built.
