When Daniel Radcliffe accepted his most famous role at age 11, he was warned that early fame would leave him “fucked up.” Chris Heath on how the actor escaped the long shadow of Harry Potter:
https://t.co/ZMrwMNBlyX- The Atlantic (@TheAtlantic)
April 30, 2024 The Atlantic profiled Daniel Radcliffe, on the heels of his first Tony nomination for Merrily We Roll Along.
He talks about when he was first cast in Potter, people assumed he'd either end up a tragic child star or only ever be known as Harry if he attempted a career after: “There was a constant kind of drumbeat of ‘Are you all going to be screwed up by this?’ Looking back, [...] I’m quite impressed with 13-, 14-year-old me’s reaction to those things. To really, actually use them. To internally be going: Fuck you, I’m going to prove that wrong.”He also says that he was generally quite sheltered from the media frenzy surrounding HP until the first premiere, where he was overwhelmed by how chaotic it was. Naturally, that was only the first time he was caught up in a flood of press attention. He credits his “incredibly loving” parents and other adults around him for setting the tone whenever things got crazy, by making the strangeness of it all funny instead of stressful. He also said it was helped that they were treated as kids rather than young stars on set.He made a conscious decision around the third Potter film to pursue acting as a career. However, this also made him more self-conscious about his performances on top of standard teenage awkwardness. He added: “I didn’t want my face to do anything weird. Like, I used to hate smiling on camera, because I hated my smile.”He mentions Half-Blood Prince was a tipping point for him as he started to struggle with alcoholism, as he has mentioned in the past. “I had a really romanticized idea of all these old actors who were always on the piss, and there were all these stories about them and they were really funny. [...] I was like, I’ve got to be able to keep up with all these hardened film crews.” One of the people to help set him straight was David Holmes, who was his stunt double for Potter and a close friend. Holmes, who was paralyzed after a freak accident on set, shared the following: “One day when he came and visited the hospital, he just looked tired- bags under his eyes, skin wasn’t too good. And I’m lying there in a bed with a neck brace on with a feeding tube up my nose. Of course, Harry Potter’s on the ward, so we’ve got loads of attention, but we put the bed curtain around and I just said to him, ‘Look, mate, you’ve got to look after yourself with this. I’m not lying here the way I am watching you piss this away. So please know, if I could get up right now and give you a hiding, I fucking would.’” The two remain close today and Radcliffe has remained sober for over a decade.He claims that making Kill Your Darlings right after Potter was pivotal, as he went from being the face of a well-oiled franchise machine to having director John Krokidas teach him more about acting as a craft. He also met long-term partner Erin Darke on the project, in which they had a brief sex scene (which he acknowledged will be awkward for their son one day). Krokidas had the pair stand “a foot from each other, and [we] made eye contact and said things that we found attractive about each other or said things that we liked about each other. And I was so immediately aware that I was going red because I was like, Oh God, there’s no way for this girl not to find out that I really like her in this moment.”On their relationship now: “I have learned so much from her about my own boundaries. Very occasionally, people will come up to me in the street and be very weird or rude or something like that. And she has given me a sense over the years of: You don’t have to just be nice to everyone when they’re weird with you. She’s given me some sense of my own autonomy, I guess.” On speaking out when JKR chose to be outspoken with her transphobia: “I’d worked with the Trevor Project for 12 years and it would have seemed like, I don’t know, immense cowardice to me to not say something. I wanted to try and help people that had been negatively affected by the comments [...] and to say that if those are Jo’s views, then they are not the views of everybody associated with the Potter franchise.”He also said that he has had no direct contact with Rowling since, and added: “It makes me really sad, ultimately, because I do look at the person that I met, the times that we met, and the books that she wrote, and the world that she created, and all of that is to me so deeply empathic.”On the reaction in the British press after he, Emma Watson, and Rupert Grint all spoke out against JKR and in support of the trans community: “There’s a version of ‘Are these three kids ungrateful brats?’ that people have always wanted to write, and they were finally able to. So, good for them, I guess. [...] Jo, obviously Harry Potter would not have happened without her, so nothing in my life would have probably happened the way it is without that person. But that doesn’t mean that you owe the things you truly believe to someone else for your entire life.”The interview was conducted before JKR's recent tantrum tweets saying she would not accept an apology from any of the stars if offered. The article's author reached out to Radcliffe about that, to which he simply replied: “I will continue to support the rights of all LGBTQ people, and have no further comment than that.”Regarding his eclectic career choices, Radcliffe added that he doesn't have to work thanks to his Potter earnings (“Not to sound like an asshole about it-I’m sure people reading this will be like, ‘For fuck’s sake’”) and that he is lucky to not only have the freedom to make offbeat projects but also to work purely for the love of it. On the type of roles he chases: “I’ve realized over the years that if there’s a sweet spot to be found between deeply fucking weird and strange and almost unsettling, and kind of wholesome and earnest and very sincere, then that’s the stuff I really love doing. [Anything] that says something kind of lovely about human beings in spite of ourselves, in spite of how bad the world is.” Soure