Shrugging off his Harry Potter image, Daniel Radcliffe has managed to set himself apart with theatre and his unconventional choices in films. Sally Williams traces the child actor’s journey from early stardom to a grounded career path.
When Daniel Radcliffe first walks in, I can’t believe how terrible he looks: sallow-faced, dark smudges under his eyes, long beard. And so thin. It quickly becomes obvious that he’s starving himself.
He says he is subsisting on a daily diet of one chicken breast and a protein bar, boosted by coffee and cigarettes. Radcliffe has been getting into character for his role in Jungle, a film adapted from a true story, where he plays Yossi Ghinsberg, a young adventurer who gets lost in the Bolivian jungle.
He has a few more ‘skinny scenes’ to shoot and then plans to celebrate with a chocolate bar. It’s not the first time he’s gone to extremes for a role. As Harry Potter, for example, he spent 41 hours being filmed under water (in The Goblet of Fire) when he couldn’t swim.
In the comedy musical, How to Succeed in Business Without Really Trying, he showcased a range of handstands, black-flips and knee-slides, which were all the more astonishing as he’s dyspraxic and couldn’t dance a step beforehand. He’s been submerged in a bog for the film The Woman in Black, based on the novel by Susan Hill.
He spent several weeks road-testing a prosthetic hump for his role as Igor, the hunchbacked assistant in the film Victor Frankenstein, and once said he’d spent so long studying medicine for his part as a graduate doctor in the TV series A Young Doctor’s Notebook, “I could probably perform a tracheotomy.”
Return to wizardry
Harry Potter is the second biggest movie franchise of all time, taking £5 billion in worldwide box-office sales. Radcliffe has added to his fortune since. He is estimated to be worth £74 million — significantly more than his co-stars Emma Watson (£35 million), who played Hermione, and Rupert Grint (£26 million), Ron.
The final film in the franchise was released four years ago, he recently said he wouldn’t rule out playing Potter again. Radcliffe said that it would depend on the script and the circumstances, but he would consider a return to the role.
Radcliffe could have just sat back after Potter. Instead he’s made nine films, a TV series, had an 11-month stretch on Broadway and appeared in the play The Cripple of Inishmaan — agreed by critics to be one of his greatest performances.
His determination to extend his range beyond the exploits of the schoolboy wizard that made him famous is extraordinary. “Let’s face it, I did have a lot to prove,” he says. “As anyone who gets famous young will feel at some point, you have to prove that you deserve the luck you got.”
His latest film is Now You See Me 2, the sequel to the Hollywood blockbuster Now You See Me, in which he stars as a billionaire tech prodigy, alongside Michael Caine, Mark Ruffalo and Jesse Eisenberg. Directed by Jon M Chu, the film reunites the professional magicians, who perform as the Four Horsemen before big crowds in Las Vegas for another adventure, this time to expose a corrupt businessman whose software secretly steals private data from its users.
At 26, Radcliffe is still full of boyish enthusiasm, still understated, and still amiable in the extreme. He has a girlfriend and says that has made a big difference. He met American actor Erin Darke on the set of Kill Your Darlings, in which he played the beat poet Alan Ginsberg, in 2012.
“People always ask, ‘How does it feel to have grown up on screen?’ And my answer has always been, I didn’t. Yes, I grew up on film sets, but my first kiss, my first girlfriend — that all happened privately, off camera.”
Along with being enormously driven, Radcliffe has always had self-doubt and neurosis, but he now admits to feeling more confident. “Sitting down for the rehearsals for The Cripple of Inishmaan, I thought, no, I belong here. I’ve done a play that transferred to Broadway. I’ve done a musical on Broadway.”
Pushing limits
On rival actors in Hollywood, he says, “I don’t think anybody is going to be questioning my position here — which they probably weren’t anyway, but sometimes what’s in your head can count for more than what’s really going on, unfortunately.” He sees himself as a ‘character lead’ and when I ask who he thought he was competing against, he says Jesse Eisenberg.
“We’re probably on a lot of the same lists, because we are quite similar in some ways, both up for nerdy leading-man roles. So it was fun to be on set with him.”
He went straight from Now You See Me 2 to shooting Swiss Army Man, a low-budget independent film in which he plays a flatulent dead body.
“I feel a lot more settled mentally, and am more comfortable with what makes me happy. More comfortable with the fact that I am a person that loves just hanging out with my friends. Or watching quiz shows. I am comfortable with the things about myself that I used to think, man, am I really boring? Should I be going out and getting wasted all the time?”
Radcliffe grew up in London, the only child of Alan, a literary agent, and Marcia Gresham, a casting agent. He was educated at Redcliffe pre-prep, Sussex House and City of London School, where he acted in school productions.
He made his screen debut at the age of 10 in the BBC’s David Copperfield (1999). He auditioned for Harry Potter in June, 2000; it was confirmed he had the role just over a month later.
He says the single most important thing he did towards the end of his Harry Potter career was to appear on stage, aged 17, in Equus, where he played a disturbed stable boy, with one of the longest nude scenes in theatre.
“If you look at interviews from that time, I’m saying, ah, it’s fine, whatever, but it was absolutely terrifying. But I’ve since had a lot of directors say that was the thing that made everyone sit up and go, oh, he’s interested in doing other stuff. You don’t do a play like Equus unless you want to be an actor.”
He is very lucky with his parents. They helped him negotiate fame — “They are incredibly down-to-earth, grounded people”.
Radcliffe’s future plans include directing — ideally his own material — and “to keep on acting”. As soon as he has finished shooting Jungle, he’s off to New York City to star in the play Privacy. Inspired by Edward Snowden’s National Security Agency revelations, Privacy, which originally premiered at the Donmar Warehouse in 2014, explores the digital footprint that we leave online.
“Harry Potter, to a point, will always define me,” he says, “but I hope in the same way that Harrison Ford is defined by Star Wars.”