Daniel Radcliffe Speaks to “Playboy” in Candid New Interview
Our childhood friend, Daniel Radcliffe, has recently been interviewed by Playboy. This interview reveals some slightly shocking information, as well as some details about our favorite boy wizard that Potter fans are always needy for.
Daniel starts off by saying that he has only recently learned to accept the attention he has received over the years and that ever since he finished filming Potter, it’s more difficult for him to go out and not receive large amounts of unwanted attention.
When I was first going out to bars and pubs, I was trying to pretend I could have a normal existence. You realize people know who you are, and when you’re in a bar they take out their camera phones. Eventually, you accept that you have to adapt how you live.
He also explains that the attention keeps on growing and addresses why the appeal of Potter has not faded. He says that it has carried on into the next generation and that he doesn’t think that the hype is going to go away. Radcliffe believes that the novels came along during the sudden blow-up of computer games and essentially reassured society that reading would not become a thing of the past. He says,
Because the stories are great! A huge part of our culture now is that if something becomes successful there’s a backlash. Harry Potter didn’t have that. There are people who don’t want to read it, but the number of people who actively dislike it is very low.
Focusing on his heavy drinking during his late teenage life, Radcliffe says that alcohol was a way of escaping his self-consciousness in public places. He refuses to talk in too much depth about the truth behind his drinking but does touch on why he did it:
Anytime I’d go out to dance, camera phones would come out. That would make me very self-conscious, and what’s the easiest way to escape being self-conscious? Alcohol is a quick way of doing that. So it was related in that way.
Radcliffe also says he wasn’t as proud of his acting on Half-Blood Prince but saw his best acting in Order of the Phoenix. He explains that he was fond of his acting in the fifth movie because it showed significant acting growth. However, he believes that in the sixth film his acting was not his best and was not the most exciting to watch:
On the sixth, I remember watching it and thinking, ‘Wow, there’s been no growth. You’re watching a mistake you made every day for 11 months – that’s the way I saw it. I had the idea that Harry was like a soldier traumatized by war, and as a result of that, he shuts down emotionally. That’s not a bad idea, but it’s not the most interesting thing to watch for two and a half hours.
Daniel says he owes his niceness even after being a child-star to the enjoyment and love that he had for being in the Harry Potter films and the support he had from the actors and crew around him. He believes that the length of time he had to grow with the people who worked with him played a great deal in how he turned out.
…That’s the notion people have in their heads of child stars. People expect me to be an absolute asshole. And when I’m not, that always plays in my favor.
He also talks about his current girlfriend, Erin Darke, and their first flirtatious encounter, which occurred on the set of Kill Your Darlings. He compliments her personality, and though he was worried about his status affecting her father’s life when there was an engagement rumor, he was relieved when her father found it humorous. In the interview, he shares what those early encounters with Darke on set were like:
That’s a wonderful record of us flirting for the first time. There’s no acting going on – not from my end, anyway. There’s a moment when she makes me laugh, and I’m laughing as me and not as my character.
Explaining his future and growing up, Radcliffe gives us the truth behind his childhood years. He says that he thinks he started masturbating relatively early but never dared to do it while on set. He says that he’d have felt quite guilty and embarrassed if he’d had done so.
I think I started very early – before my teens. But not when I was on set. I wasn’t going, ‘When is Alan Rickman going to nail this scene so I can run back to my trailer?’
In his upcoming film, Radcliffe plays a malformed character and says it was a challenge, having experienced neck and back pain. The character, being a hunchback, requires him to bend over unnaturally for copious amounts of time while filming,
It’s not like, Oh great, how can I give myself terrible back pain for the next few months? It’s more that you embrace the physical challenge. If you do something that puts you in a little bit of pain, it makes you feel as though you’re working slightly harder than you normally do as an actor.
Daniel’s film, Victor Frankenstein, will be released on November 25 this year in US theaters, while UK fans will have to wait until December 3.