How ‘one note’ Daniel Radcliffe beat the child actor curse

When the original Harry Potter films roared to a close with Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows Part 2 in 2011, the odds were that Daniel Radcliffe’s life would go one of two ways.

As a child star who became an overnight celebrity at age 11, following his casting as JK Rowling’s annoying boy wizard in August 2000, there was a decent chance he would go off the rails once he reached adulthood. If not – and this was the best-case scenario – he might retreat into obscurity, with no film career to speak of but an estimated £100m net worth to keep him warm at night.

But something entirely different has happened. The Boy Who Lived has become the adult who found his calling as acting’s go-to oddball – a Tony-award-winning weirdo for all seasons. In a month in which HBO’s forthcoming Harry Potter TV series has already lost its first cast member – 12-year-old Gracie Cochrane, who plays Ginny Weasley in the first season, has left the role – Radcliffe’s ongoing success is a reminder that being associated with the Potterverse isn’t always a curse.

Those who initially wrote him off as a terrible actor couldn’t have been more wrong. He was recently nominated for his second Tony for his role in Every Brilliant Thing on Broadway. In 2024 he won for his supporting role in the Stephen Sondheim musical Merrily We Roll Along. At the upcoming ceremony in June, Radcliffe will face keen competition from Nathan Lane, John Lithgow and Mark Strong.

As with Harry Potter, Every Brilliant Thing is not for everyone. First performed in 2013, the play, by British playwright Duncan Macmillan and comedian Jonny Donahoe, is a self-consciously upbeat meditation on depression and suicidal thoughts told from the vantage point of a frightened child and – oh dear – features extensive audience participation.

It’s a one-man (or woman) show where the lead and only role was taken by a succession of celebrities in its UK run, including Lenny Henry and Sue Perkins. On Broadway, Radcliffe alone played the troubled seven-year-old trying to get over his mother’s suicidal tendencies by celebrating everything wonderful in life, from ice cream and sunshine to people falling over and bicycles. The child grows up and the actor playing them not only has to mature along with them in the course of the evening’s running time but also frequently improvise interactions with the audience’s unpredictable responses to these “brilliant things”.

The production requires an actor of charm and versatility, or “plenty brilliant” as The Guardian’s review of Radcliffe’s performance had it. These are not adjectives that would have been applied to Radcliffe during his Potter period, when, by his own admission, his acting was initially “one note” and “complacent”.

In a way, it was under the spotlights that his career began in earnest. Ask Radcliffe where things truly achieved lift-off and he will name the 2007 West End production of Equus, a revival of Peter Shaffer’s disturbing dog-and-pony show about an unstable teenager. It required Radcliffe to let it all hang out – figuratively in terms of his acting, but also literally in the sense that the play involves full-frontal nudity.

Even while still wrapped up in Potter, Radcliffe understood it was important to put distance between himself and Hogwarts. “The best business decision I ever made is suddenly realising what freedom you have because you’ve been given it by this incredible first job,” he told Business Insider earlier this year. “I’ve heard from multiple directors since then that even if they didn’t get to see me in Equus, hearing that I had done it made people go, ‘OK, so he wants to be in this more than just a minute.’”

What’s especially impressive is that he was making these mature decisions about his career while struggling in private with his Potter fame. Being in the public eye seemed to come more naturally to his co-star Emma Watson, who, in the immediate years after the franchise ended, became one of Hollywood’s most in-demand young stars, with leading roles in Beauty and the Beast and Little Women (these days, she prefers activism to acting).

Describing himself as often “dead behind the eyes” at the peak of Potter-mania, Radcliffe tried to medicate the pressure away with binge drinking. He has recalled turning up to the Harry Potter set heavily hungover. On his days off, he would drink himself into a black-out stupor. In 2012, he became involved in a drunken brawl in New York – before going sober for good 12 months later.

Equus gave him the freedom denied to many child stars and he has since made the most of it. He was thoroughly unsettling in Horns (2013), a horror film in which he portrayed a man who wakes to find two bony protrusions emerging from his skull, and leapt at the chance to play a flatulent corpse in 2016’s dark comedy Swiss Army Man. Then came the chef’s kiss of his absurdist phase – the 2019 action comedy Guns Akimbo, in which he plays a video game nerd with guns surgically attached to his hands who is forced to star in a brutal reality show.

Guns Akimbo led to one of his highest-profile roles since the Potter films: 2023’s Weird: The Al Yankovic Story. Written by “Weird Al” himself, an American comic songwriter, the film is a parody of the stereotypical musical biopic and has Radcliffe’s Yankovic flying to Colombia to rescue Madonna (Evan Rachel Wood) from drug kingpin Pablo Escobar. It’s a wacky extravaganza that demands the actor be in on the joke yet play it entirely straight. Any winking at the audience and this ridiculous film would have collapsed in on itself.

“His post-Harry Potter career has been full of bold, interesting, fun choices –Swiss Army Man, Horns, Guns Akimbo,” Eric Appel, the director of Weird, told The Hollywood Reporter. “I was like, ‘This guy must love comedy and weird things.’ And he played those roles very seriously. He treated them as dramatic roles.”

More recently, Radcliffe’s gift for comedy is on full view in the mockumentary The Fall and Rise of Reggie Dinkins. Radcliffe is brilliantly toe-curling as film-maker Arthur Tobin, a desperately earnest director hired by the eponymous ex American football star Dinkins (30 Rock’s Tracy Morgan) to film his attempted comeback - while keeping a lid on his own obsession with rapper Meghan Thee Stallion. The series, from the team behind Netflix hit Unbreakable Kimmy Schmidt, has become a word mouth sensation since first airing in the US on NBC in January – though a UK air-date has yet to be revealed. An Emmy nomination to add to his Tony nod is surely at least an outside possibility. 

Fame at a young age is, in almost every case, more curse than blessing. From Michael Jackson to Lindsay Lohan, the entertainment industry has no lack of cautionary stories of former child stars who struggled to adjust to the demands of real life. Few were as famous as young as Radcliffe – and yet, despite the occasional wobble, he is that rare example of a nice guy who has finished first.

[Source: Daily Telegraph]