The boy who lived is all grown up
Bridget Jones finds a need for Harry Potter’s timeturner when she talks to the main man from that epic film series, Daniel Radcliffe, who’s now all grown up and about to appear on the big screen with all guns blazing.
Daniel Radcliffe is not a dick. Forget everything you think you know about child actors – or even Harry Potter – because for someone who was famously both those things, he seems, dare I say it, quite nice and fairly normal.
It’s his last day in New Zealand, and after waiting about an hour (not his fault, I’m sure), we share 25 brief minutes together in the wardrobe room of Auckland Film Studios in an industrial part of Henderson, West Auckland.
Minutes after we’re done, Radcliffe is guided into a black people-mover to start his trip home to New York after five weeks hunkered down in the New Zealand winter.
Before the publicist starts the timer on our interview, during which the only ground rule is no photos, Radcliffe offers to sign the well-loved Harry Potter book he spots in the videographer’s hands.
After we chat, he tells me it’s not at all cheeky when I apologetically ask for a selfie. For my own vanity, please believe me when I say I’ve only done the picture thing with one other person – Ghostbusters’ Dan Aykroyd – and awkwardly, he was the one who suggested the photo.
Radcliffe is the perfect tourist, happily reeling off his new favourite local spots, and promising to return to this patch of paradise.
He even swoons over Queenstown, and he didn’t actually make it that far south.
Radcliffe understands why people might think he’s a bit of an ungrateful guy. It is, he says, a child actor thing. When you’ve grown up in the industry, the law of averages suggests you might not be a pleasant person by the time you hit 18. He’s spoken before about people being shocked when he turns out to not be a dick, and I want to know what living with that kind of expectation does to a person. ‘‘It is what it is. . .’’ he shrugs.
‘‘It’s a weird thing to grow up with, but I think it just means the bar is really low, and when you exceed that just by being a vaguely decent human being, well, everyone’s just delighted.’’
He must just put it out of his mind, I suggest. Otherwise meeting new people would be torturous, and full of second-guessing?
‘‘Oh no, I thought about it all the time, when I was a teenager particularly,’’ he says, with a tired smile. ‘‘But I think it just made me super conscientious, so I’m going to prove with every fibre of my being that I am not a dick. It probably led to me being way too polite to people who were really rude to me, for years.
‘‘It’s only in the last few years where I’ve realised, ‘OK, you don’t have to take that’.’’
He is not, he assures me, a horrible person to the ones who push the limit on decency.
‘‘I don’t drink any more, but if I’m at a bar and people are super drunk, I don’t usually indulge [their behaviour] in the way that I used to. My patience for that has dramatically lessened as I’ve got slightly older.’’
Radcliffe was 28 when we spoke on that winter’s afternoon in West Auckland. He’ll turn 31 in July.
That’s right, this is certainly a snapshot of a movie star . . . almost two years ago. Surprise! This is how the Hollywood sausage factory operates.
I had, perhaps naively, calculated he would be on the verge of turning 30 when the film we were there to talk about, the New Zealand-filmed Guns
Akimbo, would be released.
He was a little horrified to talk about the milestone birthday, but little did we know, that would come and go before the surrealist action film would find its way to audiences.
When he stops bristling at the big 3-0, Radcliffe takes stock of the career that began well before Hogwarts.
‘‘If you had said to me when I was 9, which was when I started, that you’re going to have at least a 20-year career in this industry, I would have taken that. And to be almost 10 years on from Potter, and still be working and loving my job, and working with cool, interesting, new people all the time, yeah, I’m pretty happy with how it’s all going. I just want to keep it up for another 30 years and more.
‘‘That’s the great thing about being an actor; you don’t have to retire until they stop casting you.’’
We all know the trick. You get in with a dig about the elephant in the room before someone else does. For Radcliffe, that elephant is obviously the fact he had more fame as a 15-year-old than most actors twice that age could ever dream about.
Rather than fight against the child actor tag and choosing projects that feel designed to distract audiences and prove his mettle as an ‘‘artist’’, Radcliffe seems to appreciate the reason he can make wacky, unusual decisions these days (and there have been some very unusual choices) is because it’s a luxury his early work has afforded him.
‘‘There are lots of other child actors who people don’t really think of as child actors because they have been so successful as adults. I’ll always be thought of, in some ways, as [a child actor] because
Potter will always be such a huge part of my career,’’ he says.
‘‘It frees you up to make your own choices and not have to worry about making money or trying to gain fame, or anything like that. But not everyone is in that position, so . . . I am insanely lucky.’’
He cites his parents as the people he still seeks career advice from, and former Potter co-stars, including Gary Oldman, David Thewlis and Imelda Staunton, as role models, as actors and people.
‘‘These are all the people I grew up with, and who prove you can be an amazing actor and a fantastic and normal human being at the same time. They have such fun doing their jobs, and I think that was a great lesson for me when I was a kid.
‘‘Sometimes acting should be hard work and you should be struggling, but you can also just have fun on set – we are not saving lives.’’
In his new film, Radcliffe is definitely not saving lives – he’s trying to take them.
Guns Akimbo is a wild ride from local director Jason Lei Howden, who also made Deathgasm.
Radcliffe plays Miles, a video game developer who wakes up one morning to find himself the next participant in a real-life, live-streamed deathmatch. Oh, and he has guns attached to his hands.
For anyone who has only seen him as little bespectacled Harry Potter, it sounds an outrageous role.
He looks like human trash for a large part of it, it’s grimy and violent, and the very idea is pretty kooky. But, for Radcliffe, it was finally a chance to pay homage to the genre he adores but felt a little excluded from.
‘‘I love action movies, but I don’t particularly see myself in them a lot, and I don’t read a lot of action movie scripts where I see myself as ‘the guy’. Whereas, I absolutely see myself as this person.
‘‘Also, for me, things that are lacking in a lot of action films are humour and a lot of self-awareness of how silly and fun and crazy it all is, and this script has that. It manages to be both a full-on action movie and a love letter to action movies, hopefully.’’
Radcliffe, who says his favourite action film is
The Matrix, which he admits might not be a ‘‘proper’’ representation of the genre, certainly isn’t your usual shoot ’em up leading man. He’s small – 1.65cm – but solid and strong. When I speak to him though, he looks exhausted. But, then again, many of his days on set had actually been nights.
Since his career began 21 years ago, Radcliffe has appeared in nine stage productions, nine TV series, 25 films, and two music videos. He reckons he’d ‘‘go mad’’ if he took a year off.
He clearly loves to keep people guessing about his work, perhaps himself most of all.
In films, he’s played budding writers and young magicians, dog walkers, and dead bodies. He’s been a doctor with an opioid issue, and a man with horns growing out of his head.
‘‘None of them seem like risks to me at the time,’’ he says.
Most people would suggest his turn in Equus while still filming Potter was the boldest call of his career – ‘‘obviously I get naked in it, but more than that, it’s a very dark, confrontational, disturbing play, and very uncomfortable in some ways for some people’’ – but Radcliffe’s pick is far more revealing.
‘‘Probably the riskiest thing I’ve done was a musical on Broadway, because I could not dance when I started the process of that. That was the biggest leap of faith I’ve ever made; I’ll sign up to do this in 18 months, and I’ll trust that I will have learnt to dance acceptably by then.
‘‘I trained the whole 18 months . . . I’m a procrastinator in my personal life, but with my job I can’t relax until I know I’m doing as much as I can.’’
And it’s directing that might be the next bit of risky business. He has stories he wants to tell, and thinks he might be pretty decent behind the camera. But even with that, there’s a charming humility when pushed about what shape that might take.
‘‘It’s just about finding the right script to direct, or possibly write something myself to direct, which might be easier than convincing somebody else to give me their material as a first-time director,’’ he says.
The publicist is giving us the wrap up, and since he’s about to head home, to his life, I have to ask, what is a perfect day for Daniel Radcliffe? Tellingly, he is instantly energised by the very thought of it.
‘‘Probably what I’m going to be doing when I get off the plane: I’ll go to the gym in the morning and get that done, and then I’ll spend the rest of the day eating. I do one of those ‘six days a week I eat normally and then one day I go insane’, so it will be that day,’’ he says wistfully, like it’s been a while.
‘‘It’s just about the quantity of icecream and cookies and biscuits and chocolate bars and anything I can pack my body with.’’
After previews in select cinemas this weekend, Guns Akimbo (R16) will open nationwide on Thursday.