In Kill Your Darlings he is the nerdy, needy young Ginsberg, desperate to hold on to his gorgeous, enigmatic boyfriend. The two performances I watch in quick succession could not be more different. In short, the type who can make a decent living but would never command the salary Radcliffe did as a teenager. It's ironic that, having grown up as Potter, a leading man being paid leading man's wages (and then some), he is now establishing himself as a fine character actor, the type who plays the second or third lead, or the quirky cameo, not quite handsome enough to be a romantic lead. You have to embrace the fact that you were involved in this incredibly cool thing that did wonders for the British film industry and though you might not always be happy with the work you did on it, the opportunity it has given you to forge a career for yourself is amazing." It's just a fact of your life, so you can't get annoyed by it or resent it. It would be like… Paul McCartney might have gone on to do a lot of other things, but people are always going to want to talk about the Beatles. "I know that Potter is going to be with me for the rest of my life, so to try to set a goal where nobody talks about that any more is stupid. Radcliffe says he doesn't want to sound ungrateful. He is fiendishly polite, slight, well turned out. If you'd never seen him before, you might assume he was a children's television presenter.
He's wearing tight jeans, no glasses, and is a super ball of energy.
He has a hacking cough that can't be helped by his frequent trips to the window for "a bit of fresh air", or what the rest of us call a cig. We first meet at the West End offices of his agent, just before an evening performance of The Cripple Of Inishmaan. Potter made him unbelievably wealthy, and he also made his every social outing meat and drink for the tabloids. Has an actor ever had such an ambivalent relationship with the character who made him famous? For many people Radcliffe is Potter, and Potter is Radcliffe. Oi, show some respect, I say – it's Harry Potter. That's all it's governed by there's no master plan to distance myself from Potter with every role."īut it's telling that he uses just the surname, which has exactly that distancing effect. There's nothing more exciting to me when I read a script than originality. I'm not interested in making films I've seen before. I think I've got good taste, but it's slightly left of centre. I pick films based on scripts and directors and parts. There have been plenty of weird roles so far, and more to come, I hope. "I can't put it down to anything more than that I've got weird taste.
He looks pleased when he tells the story. Radcliffe says he was doing a Q&A recently and somebody in the audience asked why he played such weird parts. Now he's at it again, with another part from which Harry Potter would run a mile: in Kill Your Darlings, he plays gay beat poet Allen Ginsberg, sexually infatuated with the dangerous Lucien Carr.
Yet over the past half-dozen years, he has done everything he possibly could to distinguish himself from Harry: riding a horse naked and aroused on stage in Peter Shaffer's Equus, limping around stage as Billy Claven in The Cripple Of Inishmaan, haunted by ghosts in the horror movie The Woman In Black. The funny thing is, apart from the fags and the facial hair, he doesn't really look any different from the speccy schoolboy wizard who made his screen debut in 2001. It feels as if he's been with us for ever. But here he is, at 24, more than half his life spent in the business, 16 movies behind him, eight of them Harry Potter blockbusters.
He has a point: most people his age have barely started out. Daniel Radcliffe says he has just been called a national treasure, and it has left him discombobulated.