Britain’s Got Talent finalist Jonathan Goodwin has been left paralysed after one of his stunts went drastically wrong during rehearsals for a spin-off of America’s Got Talent.
Jonathan, who is originally from Wales, reached the semi-final of Simon Cowell’s US talent show in 2020 after reaching the final of Britain’s Got Talent the previous year.
In October last year, he was rehearsing at the Atlanta Motor Speedway in Hampton, Georgia for America’s Got Talent: Extreme when he fell 30 feet to the ground after being crushed between two cars in midair.
The stunt was supposed to see the escapologist free himself and fall underneath the vehicles before they collided but the cars were released too early.
His fiancée, the Sherlock actor Amanda Abbington has now revealed the horrifying extent of his injuries, which have left him paralysed.
“He fell 30 feet and lost a kidney, broke both shoulder blades, shattered both legs,” she told Jay Rayner on the Out To Lunch podcast.
“Third degree burns, broke his spine, severed his spinal cord and nearly died. And then on the operating table, he nearly died again.
“He’s just been in rehab since October… He’s paralysed now, he’s in a wheelchair. Unless there’s a kind of stem cell surgery or that thing that Elon Musk is designing with the little chip, he’ll be like that [forever].”
Despite his devastating injuries, Amanda said Jonathan has stayed “positive and upbeat and so strong”.
Amanda also recalled receiving a voicemail from Jonathan before his surgery, when he told her he loved her and said there was a 50% chance he wouldn’t make it.
Thankfully, he survived and the 41-year-old has been keeping fans updated on his recovery.
Jonathan previously told fans after his accident: “There is a long road to recovery and that won’t look like what it did…
“I may leave the daft shit alone for a while, but I have a lot left to do in this world.”
NBC promoted AGT: Extreme, an eight-episode spin-off from its highly successful America’s Got Talent series, as a showcase of “the most outrageous, unique and jaw-dropping acts of enormous scale and magnitude that simply cannot be confined to a theatre stage”.
Production on the show, which was set to broadcast in 2022, was suspended following the accident to “focus on the wellbeing of crew”.