Daniel Radcliffe Conquers Hot Sauce Challenge on First We Feast’s “Hot Ones”
As 2020 is drawing to a close, ’tis the season to assess all the challenges we have faced to combat lockdown boredom. By challenges, we mean things like dying your hair a less-than-office-friendly color or trying out new bakes. Then there are food challenges, which can always spice up a night in. Daniel Radcliffe might just agree with this. With magical prowess putting Harry Potter to shame, he recently tackled a whole range of hot sauces on First We Feast’s Hot Ones series.
Daniel braved the hot wings in the comfort of his kitchen over Zoom with host Sean Evans, whom he matched bite for bite as they chatted about his latest projects, fantasy football league, and quiz shows. As Daniel valiantly tackled hotter and hotter sauces, he shared some highs and lows about eating on the set of Harry Potter:
The crazy banquet scenes at Hogwarts, the breakfasts particularly, where it was like I, as an 11-, 12-year-old child, was just piling on fried eggs and bacon and sausages and baked beans every morning for just days. That was great! And then in one of the films, I have to eat gillyweed that I think was black licorice lace. It was designed to look like a kind of underwater seaweed plant that I could then shovel down my throat, and that was pretty gross. I remember by the third or fourth take, I was like, ‘Oh! How many more of these are we going to do?’
While it is a wild exaggeration that he went through 160 pairs of glasses during his time playing the Boy Who Lived, Daniel said 60–70 wands would be closer to the truth:
The wands, I definitely broke a lot because I would just drum on my legs with it all the time and do that incessantly, and so probably once every three or four weeks, it would just weaken to the point where it snapped. And then I would say I was very sorry to the prop master, and he would give me a look like ‘Please, stop drumming.’ They were very, very sweet with us and tolerated more than I hoped they would from an adult actor.
Lacking a real-life Invisibility Cloak, Daniel also shared some of his brilliant paparazzi evasion tactics:
It happened when I was doing ‘Equus’ in London, and basically, you’re in a situation where the paparazzi know where you are and know you will be leaving at around the same time every night. So if they just want to get pictures of you looking tired and pale, which is my go-to look, then they can just wait by the side way where you come out and take them as you leave. And because it’s the same door, it’s the same background, I’m walking out the same way every night, if I’m wearing the same clothes, they all look like they’re from the same day, so there’s no more value in it. So I was just like, yeah, I’m totally comfortable wearing the same pair of jeans and this jacket for the next three months. So I did that. And then, I have to say, I got given a gift once, which is crazy that someone makes this because it’s such a niche market, but it was given to me. This is an anti-paparazzi jacket. It’s one of those jackets where it only works at night, I think, but if you wear it with the hood up and it’s at night and you take a photo with a flash, it wipes out everything on the camera except for the hoodie. So you just get a photo of just a floating ghost hoodie. I have used that once, and I never saw those pictures, so I can only assume it worked.
Daniel finished the challenge with the help of a couple of glasses of milk to soothe the burn enough to remind us that Escape from Pretoria and Guns Akimbo are both available on-demand. Get some spicy snacks for a rad movie night.
