VERY BAD TRIP
Daniel Radcliffe worms away from wizarding in survival tale
DANIEL Radcliffe’s 2016 movie “Swiss Army Man” became known — fairly, it must be said — as the “farting corpse movie.” But his new wilderness drama, “Jungle,” boasts a gnarly claim to rival that one: It’s the “cuts a live parasite out of his forehead movie.”
Radcliffe stars in the harrowing true story of Israeli traveler Yossi Ghinsberg, who spent three weeks lost alone in the Bolivian rainforest in 1981 after getting separated from the other men in his group. At one point, he discovers that a boil on his forehead is moving underneath its surface, and takes a pocketknife to it.
Nobody could accuse the 28-year-old British actor of playing it safe in his post“Harry Potter” acting career — and why should he? Given the bountiful financial returns of starring in a world-beloved franchise, he’s free to do whatever he likes. He’s made 10 films since the final “Potter” movie in 2011, and his roles have included playing Beat poet Allen Ginsberg in “Kill Your Darlings” (2013) and putting a new spin on the hunchbacked assistant Igor in 2015’s “Victor Frankenstein.” In two of his recent indies, he’s really gone for it in survivalist tales (although, admittedly, he was not the survivor in “Swiss Army Man”) that don’t skimp on the details of all that can go wrong with the human body.
And yet, “Something much worse happened in real life,” Radcliffe tells The Post of the parasite moment in his new movie. “In reality, 15 to 20 of those things were inside [Ghinsberg]. He got rid of all of them. But we decided you can only push an audience so far.”
The actor was delighted with the way the scene turned out when the director called “cut,” he says: “I looked up, and the crew all looked disgusted,” he says. “They see a lot of gross makeup stuff. So I thought, if this is working on you guys . . . it’s working!”
It’s not the only grueling scene for Radcliffe, whose character is tossed out of his boat into raging rapids, forges his way through a neck-deep mud pit, forces himself to be bitten all over with fire ants to stay alert and eats a fetal chick out of an eggshell. The latter is an actual delicacy in some parts of the world, but Radcliffe, who admits to being “not a very adventurous eater,” says that, thankfully, “they made a few really good mock-up versions of it.”
But when director Greg McLean (“The Belko Experiment”) asked him if he’d pop a snail in his mouth for another scene, Radcliffe agreed, albeit reluctantly. “There’s that part of me that says, ‘You’ve got to be a good actor,’ so I said, ‘Yep, I’ll do it,’ ” he says. “Then I realized they’d been f - - king with me the whole time and had a perfectly good fake one.”
He did enjoy getting to know the real Ghinsberg, who consulted with him before and during the shoot. “The nice thing about being an actor,” Radcliffe says, “is you get to sit down with people who’ve lived extraordinary lives.” Despite the terror Ghinsberg experienced during those weeks, “he said there were moments when he was genuinely having a great time,” says Radcliffe. “It was not all bad. He said some of the most beautiful moments of his life were in those three weeks.”
As for the actor, “I am very much not an outdoorsy kind of person,” he admits. “But there is something about the spirit of ‘Jungle,’ where you read that script and go, ‘Yeah, I’m going to be challenged, and it’s going to be more arduous than most films are, and that’s something I enjoy.’” Still, when he got a week off from the shoot in Colombia, he did not opt for a backpacking trip: “I went to LA,” he says, “and visited my girlfriend!”