Profile
Photos
Comments
@import url(https://graphics8.nytimes.com/css/article/screen/print.css);
Onstage, Stripped of That Wizardry
LONDON
DRESSED in a leather jacket and hunched antisocially over his cellphone, Daniel
Radcliffe could have been any other disaffected teenager adrift in
gadget-world. But suddenly he looked up and leapt to his feet as if prodded by
Emily Post herself.
“Sorry,” he said. “Sorry! I’m just checking on the cricket scores. They’re
about to start for the day.”
“They” were the members of the England cricket team, Mr. Radcliffe explained.
He held forth for a few minutes about the sport’s subtle joys and then observed,
“It is a concept that Americans can’t get hold of, cricket.”
It was early in the summer. Filming had just finished for “Harry Potter and
the Half-Blood Prince,” the sixth in the blockbuster movie series. A year
earlier Mr. Radcliffe had ended his West End run as Alan Strang, the highly
troubled (and, for a time, stark naked) main character in a revival of the 1970s
psychosexual drama “Equus.” Rehearsals for the play’s transfer to Broadway — it
is to open Sept. 25 at the Broadhurst Theater — had not yet begun.
Mr. Radcliffe, who turned 19 in July, was enjoying a much-needed break, one
of the longest stretches of free time he has had since he starred in “Harry
Potter and the Sorcerer’s Stone” at the age of 12 and became the world’s
best-known child actor. He was spending the time, it appeared, hanging out,
obsessing about cricket and marshaling his views. He has a catholic array of
deeply held opinions — on sloppy diction, on whining actors, on male
competitiveness, on the changing-of-the-guard ceremony at Buckingham Palace, on
the spelling of “aluminum” — and in several conversations over the summer he was
more than happy to disseminate them. But although he says his chatty
forthrightness makes him “an intensely annoying person,” it comes across instead
as an endearing sign of post-adolescent normalcy.
Mr. Radcliffe appears to be negotiating the tricky transition from child star
to adult actor without falling prey to drug-addled delusion, insufferable
narcissism or late-night reality television. His experience in “Equus,” which
played to sellout crowds last year, has a lot to do with his confidence. Despite
early grumbles that his casting was a cynical ploy, audiences loved him, and
even London’s jaded critics were impressed. “This is a performance by an actor
of real potential,” Michael Billington wrote in The Guardian. Quentin Letts in
The Daily Mail praised “the emergence of young Dan Radcliffe in the artistic
raw, tested as an actor and found equal to a stretching role.”
Mr. Radcliffe looks nothing like Harry
Potter. He wears no glasses; he has no scar on his forehead. He talks
rapidly, with a streetwise London accent. He is buff from “Equus”-related
exercise. He is 5 foot 5, shorter than you would think (as so many actors are)
but comfortable enough to joke ruefully about it. In London in June he was
wearing jeans, a black T-shirt with an indeterminate artsy picture on the front
and a leather biker’s jacket. He was compellingly polite.
“Equus” is a momentous play for people who came of age in the 1970s.
Revelatory, even revolutionary, at the time, it now somewhat quaintly recalls
that era’s debates about sanity and madness, with lengthy discussions of the
virtues and limitations of therapy. Older friends had talked to Mr. Radcliffe
about what the play meant to them, he said, and the role was a way to prove that
he could put aside childish things without being too obvious about it.
“If I went off and did another fantasy film, everyone would say, ‘He’s not
even trying,’ but if I went off and played a drug dealer, they’d say, ‘God, he’s
trying way too hard,’ ” he said.
“It’s also the fact that he’s very different from Harry, a very violent
character — he’s mentally unstable, that’s the long and short of it,” he said of
his character. Alan Strang is a tortured soul with a deep connection to horses
who, having blinded six of them in a night of misguided religious and sexual
ecstasy, is stripped of his defenses and possibly his soul in a series of
grueling sessions with a psychiatrist, played by Richard Griffiths. (Mr.
Griffiths is reprising his role from the West End show; the other actors are all
new to the cast.)
In a follow-up conversation by telephone last month from New York, where
rehearsals for the new production were under way, Mr. Radcliffe said he had been
adjusting to Broadway and the cast, and refining his part by watching “A
Clockwork Orange” at Mr. Griffith’s suggestion.
“I didn’t want to just rehash the performance,” he said. “I wanted it to be a
lot stronger and have a lot more anger. Also, the ideas they play with in ‘A
Clockwork Orange’ are so similar. It’s about taking away what makes someone an
individual so they fit into society as a whole.”
The Harry Potter role has been so all-consuming that it has left Mr.
Radcliffe with little time for anything else. In recent years he has appeared in
“December Boys,” a coming-of-age film, and “My Boy Jack,” a television movie,
and sent himself up deliciously as a awkwardly pseudo-worldly, sex-mad teenager
in an episode of the Ricky
Gervais BBC-HBO comedy series “Extras.” But mostly it has been all Harry all the time, and Mr.
Radcliffe has had to grow up on screen, in full public view, braving the twin
perils of adolescence and the forces of Voldemort.
Before “Equus” he had never appeared onstage, unless you count his
performance, at the age of 5, as a monkey in a school play. He nervously
resolved, before the “Equus” rehearsals began, not to act out “the stereotype of
the child actor who’s going to be a nightmare,” he said. But the director, Thea
Sharrock, said he was far from nightmarish.
“When I first met him, I felt very impressed by his level of discipline and
professionalism,” she said in an interview. “We all could finally see, you know,
he’s not Harry Potter — he’s Daniel Radcliffe. I felt excited to find this
character with him and to prove to the world that this was something he could
do.”
The play requires Mr. Radcliffe to appear full-frontally nude in a prolonged
scene, but it did not bother him particularly, he said.
“It never really was an issue,” he said. “I don’t know why, it probably
should have been. I am terribly self-conscious. Although I remember I did look
at my dad once and say, ‘Do you think I could wear pants?’ ” (No, he could not.)
Mr. Radcliffe found he suffered onstage from what he called Michelangelo’s
David Effect.
He explained. “He” — meaning David — “wasn’t very well endowed, because he
was fighting Goliath. There was very much of that effect. You tighten up like a
hamster. The first time it happened, I turned around and went, ‘You know,
there’s a thousand people here, and I don’t think even one of them would expect
you to look your best in this situation.’ ”
It was the emotional nakedness that was more daunting, he said, and that he
had no stage experience. “I was absolutely starting from scratch,” he said.
So he took extensive acting lessons. He learned the Alexander Technique. He
did vocal exercises in which, given a text, he read aloud just the vowels, and
then just the consonants. (“Bizarrely, it makes a massive difference in how you
understand the text,” he said.) He learned how to project. He imagined that
different parts of the room represented different sorts of emotion, and ran back
and forth between them, emoting.
Mr. Griffiths, who has appeared as Harry Potter’s unpleasant Uncle Vernon in
several films, said he had watched Mr. Radcliffe progress over the years. “If
you look at the films, you see a progression from a nice, amiable little boy who
is carefully instructed to someone who’s more and more assuming control of the
character and saying, ‘I think he should be doing this,’ ” he said.
The journey from child star to bona fide actor is a tough one, he added.
“When you get someone who’s been a very famous, high-powered star who has to
make the transition to being a working actor, they very often have nothing to
bring to the table except being told what to do. When they’re offered an adult
character, they woodenly spit out the dialogue — out comes all these tricks
they’ve relied on in the past. And they have terrible status problems. The
minute you become a junior member of an acting company, you’re just dogsbody
like anyone else.”
But Mr. Radcliffe resolved to be different. “He did loads of research and
spent a lot of time thinking about it,” Mr. Griffiths said. “He’s got a
lightning-fast mind and picks up things very rapidly. Once he gets it, he’s got
it.”
Mr. Radcliffe is an only child who grew up in Fulham, West London. His mother
is a casting agent; his father is a former literary agent who quit to manage his
son’s career. He fell into acting at the age of 9, he said, because he had few
talents in school or at sports. An agent who was a friend of his parents (and
who now represents him) suggested that he audition for a role as the young David
in a BBC film of “David Copperfield” as a confidence-boosting exercise; he got
the part. He also appeared in the film “The Tailor of Panama,” and won his big
role, the part of Harry Potter, after being repeatedly urged to audition by its
producer, David Heyman, another family friend.
Although he has spent a couple of semesters at a regular school, he has
mostly had tutors. Many of his friends are older — “I’ve always loved the
company of adults,” he said — and many are women.
“I hate the way men can take a perfectly good subject and turn it into a
competition,” he said. “It irritates me. I like cars, but they talk about tire
pressure and horsepower. Does it go fast? Yes or no? You don’t have to give me
an actual speed. All the boys at school wanted to get Lamborghinis, and I wanted
a Golf GTI.”
Mr. Radcliffe still lives in the house he grew up in, with his parents and
two dogs, Binka and Nugget. (Nugget is not, oddly enough, named after the lead
horse in “Equus.” Rather the Radcliffes have a tradition of giving dogs names
that can follow the word “chicken”; a previous dog was named Tikka.)
He is extremely close to his parents. “Sometimes I can feel a bit sorry for
myself if I’ve been lying down in the mud for the night shoot and then I have to
get up at 4:30 the next morning,” he said. “But my mum and dad have always said,
if anyone’s complaining, ‘Well, you’re not down a mine.’ ”
He added: “Actors give themselves a bad reputation, and I think it’s a shame.
It’s why some people resent them for being famous and think they do no work
comparatively. But it’s a great job. And it’s not down a mine.”
He is as private as he is voluble. In a recent magazine interview he
suggested that he lost his virginity several years ago to an older woman, and he
may or may not be currently involved with a girlfriend, but he is not going to
talk about it. He can generally walk down the street without getting noticed.
But like any show business figure in Britain he has to contend with the British
news media and their fanciful stories.
“Do you want the Top 5?” he asked. He reeled them off. “One of them was how I
had grown two foot in about five weeks,” he said. “The next was that I had a
stalker, which again was utter fiction. One of them was that I had asked two
former S.A.S. guards to walk my dogs,” referring to an elite British military
branch. “One of them was that I ordered a special beer that was brewed in a
monastery in Belgium by monks. And I hate beer. And then, the best one was the
fact that they said that I was having a sculpture made for the middle of my
living room of me in ‘Equus.’ ”
Nude, of course.
