Jonathan Goodwin

Jonathan Goodwin is a Welsh escapologist and daredevil born on 20 February 1980 in Haverfordwest, Pembrokeshire, Wales, where he grew up in the village of Robeston Wathen. He attended Tasker Milward Voluntary Controlled School in Haverfordwest before embarking on a career in stunt performance and escape artistry.

Goodwin's television career began with an appearance on the Channel 4 programme Dirty Tricks, which led to further work on specials including The Seven Stupidest Things to Escape From, Deathwish Live, and Monkey Magic. He went on to appear on the Discovery Channel in One Way Out and How Not to Become Shark Bait, the latter of which featured him allowing a Caribbean reef shark to attack him. In 2009, Discovery Channel aired a ten-part series of One Way Out in which Goodwin was joined by engineer Terry Stroud. He also appeared in an episode of the Channel 4 programme Balls of Steel, with his father assisting him on a stunt.

In September 2012, it was announced that Goodwin would front his own series on UKTV's Watch channel called The Incredible Mr. Goodwin, which began airing in early 2013 and featured stunts ranging from free climbing skyscrapers to extreme planking. The series was subsequently broadcast on UKTV's Dave and on BBC America from July 2013. On 9 March 2013, he appeared on The Jonathan Ross Show and performed a stunt involving lying on a single nail while a breeze block was broken on his chest with a sledgehammer.

Between 2014 and 2016, Goodwin brought his skills to Broadway as a featured performer in three consecutive productions under The Illusionists banner: The Illusionists - Witness the Impossible, The Illusionists - Live on Broadway, and The Illusionists - Turn of the Century. In April 2019, he competed on the thirteenth series of Britain's Got Talent, reaching the finals with a buried alive stunt that marked the first time such an act had been performed on a stage in that context. The following year, he appeared on America's Got Talent, where he advanced to the semifinal round.

From October 2020 through September 2021, Goodwin performed in the Las Vegas show Fantasy at the Luxor, where his sets included a bullwhip act and a blindfolded crossbow routine in which he struck progressively smaller objects held by an assistant.

In October 2021, during a rehearsal for America's Got Talent: Extreme, Goodwin sustained catastrophic injuries while attempting a stunt that required him to escape from a straitjacket while suspended upside-down thirty feet in the air between two cars. The cars collided and caught fire, crushing him in the process. His injuries included third-degree burns, a broken spine, a severed spinal cord, two broken shoulder blades, shattered legs, and the loss of a kidney. He was discharged from hospital in February 2022, having been left paralysed from the waist down and reliant on a wheelchair. As a result of these injuries, Goodwin retired from stunt performance.

In his personal life, Goodwin was previously married to a woman named Katy, with whom he has a daughter. He is engaged to actress Amanda Abbington, whom he proposed to within thirty minutes of their first in-person meeting, which took place in Vienna. The accident occurred approximately five weeks after their engagement.