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Daniel Radcliffe's stage debut in Equus, writes Adam Green, marks the
arrival of a serious, mature talent.
Photographed by Annie Leibovitz.
Like cartons of milk, most child stars carry a "sell by" date,
generally coinciding with the onset of puberty, after which they start to
curdle. There have been notable exceptions, of course—Jodie Foster comes to
mind, and Christian Bale—but by and large, once kids who have grown up in the
public eye stop being adorable, they find themselves trapped by the image of who
they once were and tend to self-destruct or fade away.
Which is what
makes the metamorphosis of Daniel Radcliffe, otherwise known as Harry Potter,
such a neat trick. Since becoming the big-screen incarnation of J. K. Rowling's
bespectacled hero at eleven, the star of the $4.5 billion-grossing franchise has
managed to navigate the Scylla and Charybdis of adolescence and fame to emerge,
at nineteen, a charming and unaffected lad-about-town—almost a leading man but
still, as millions of flushed preteen cheeks can attest, a schoolgirl
heartthrob. His solid turns in last year's coming-of-age drama December
Boys and World War I weeper My Boy Jack boded well for life after
Potter. But it was his much-ballyhooed stage debut on the West End, in Peter
Shaffer's Equus, that let him shed the cloak of boy wizard, stripping
himself bare, emotionally and literally, to reveal a serious actor of
charismatic intensity and depth.
This month, New York audiences will
finally get to see Radcliffe as he reprises his performance, opposite a Potter
costar, the brilliant Richard Griffiths, in the first Broadway revival of
Shaffer's 1973 psycho-religious thriller about a teen who blinds six horses with
a metal spike and the court-designated psychiatrist who tries to discover why.
I meet up with Radcliffe for Diet Cokes one evening at the Soho Hotel in
London, where he arrives straight from the set of Harry Potter and the
Half-Blood Prince. Wearing jeans and a black T-shirt, he is short and
compact, with a lively face and watchful eyes. He is open and affable—clearly
not the clueless Lothario that he played in self-parody on an episode of
Extras, though, he admits, "I'd love to have that blind confidence, that
total oblivion to how the world sees you."
In fact, Radcliffe broods
about how he is perceived, particularly by co-workers. "They're always expecting
some terrible person to turn up," he says. "So you try to make sure that they
know that you're intelligent and not horrible. Then you try to be rugged and
sexy—but only after smart and lovable."
Two other adjectives that come
to mind are hyperarticulate and voluble. Words rocket out of his
mouth in apparent pursuit of his darting, mercurial thoughts, careening, in our
first ten minutes together, from a discussion about New York theater audiences
to a diatribe against bad grammar, a recital of Keats's "Ode to a Nightingale,"
a paean to the Sex Pistols, and an analysis of the Segway scooter as an emblem
of epidemic laziness. "A friend of mine once said, 'God—the things you say!' "
Radcliffe recalls. "I thought, Imagine the things I don't say. You can't
possibly imagine what it's like to actually live inside this head."
As
Alan Strang, in Equus, Radcliffe gets to live inside a very different
sort of mind—tortured and floridly psychotic. Socially awkward, slow at school,
and torn by sexual confusion and Christian guilt, Alan escapes into an
elaborate, self-created religion based on the ritual worship of horses. A stable
boy by day, by night he strips naked and finds ecstatic release astride a
stallion he has dubbed Equus, "the Godslave, Faithful and True." On a collision
course between personal desire and the wrath of a jealous deity, he gallops
toward his terrible apotheosis. "I think that everyone has got more in common
with Alan than they would like to admit," Radcliffe says. "I've never put out a
bunch of horses' eyes, of course, but you turn to your own emotions—the sadness,
the anger, the loneliness—and just explode them."
The only child of
parents involved in the arts, Radcliffe announced at age five that he might want
to be an actor. "My mother said, 'No, you don't,' " he recalls. She finally
relented and allowed him to audition for a television movie of David
Copperfield when he was nine, largely because, he says, "I was having a hard
time at school, in terms of being crap at everything, with no discernible
talent." Radcliffe also suffers from dyspraxia, a developmental disorder
affecting motor skills, and he still has trouble tying his shoes. "I sometimes
think, Why, oh why, has Velcro not taken off?" he says.
His performance
in David Copperfield led to a cameo in The Tailor of Panama and,
eventually, to Harry Potter, a role that has made him a household face and
earned him a fortune. As someone who grew up going to the theater and can hold
forth on the virtues of Sondheim and Mamet, Radcliffe was a natural to make the
leap from screen to stage. "A great play goes beyond anything a film can achieve
because you know that you've seen something special, something that people of
future generations won't see," Radcliffe says. "It's like a live concert—it
happened once, and you were there."
What better way for a young actor to
announce his coming-of-age than by playing a famously troubled boy who hasn't
quite arrived, to say the least. Equus, which ruffled many
psychotherapeutic feathers back in the day for its decidedly ambivalent view of
the talking cure, is the work of a playwright with an eye for spectacle, a
yearning for transcendence, and a gift for turning ideas into the stuff of human
conflict. Like The Royal Hunt of the Sun, Shaffer's 1964 epic about the
Spanish conquest of Peru, Equus is animated by the pageantry of devotion.
It shares with both that play and the later Amadeus a preoccupation with
a big question—How are we to live without a belief in God?—and the clash between
Apollonian reason and Dionysian ecstasy, between mediocrity and genius.
For this new production, the gifted young director Thea Sharrock has
brought back the original designer, John Napier, whose spare, modular set and
iconic metal horse masks and hooves have become essential elements of the play.
"The exciting thing about Equus is that it's completely unafraid to be
theatrical in the most important sense," she says. "Having said that, it's also
an intensely intimate personal drama."
That drama is played out between
Radcliffe, whose character's madness is lit by a spark of the divine, and
Griffiths, whose unhappy therapist, Martin Dysart, envious of the boy's ability
to experience a rapture he will never know, kills his soul to cure his mind,
destroying himself in the process. "This man needs just as much help as the boy
does," says Griffiths, who won a 2006 Tony for The History Boys.
"Spiritually, he's holding himself together with baling wire and duct tape. He's
like the figure in the Stevie Smith poem 'Not Waving but Drowning.' Nobody gets
it—they just wave back at him—and he's left in despair at the end of the play
because he's going to do what society wants by fixing the boy and making him
normal, but he questions whether what society wants is worth a mouthful of
spit."
Radcliffe is eager to get back into the rehearsal room and looks
forward to getting to know New York City. As he once again explores his
character's private passion, he'll continue to explore an obsession of his own:
writing poetry in the classical tradition. "Poetry's this wonderful, sort of
secret thing you've got going that you don't tell anybody about," he says.
"Unless, of course, it's published, or you talk to a journalist about it. Acting
has confines; poetry has none."
Despite his ardor, it seems unlikely that
Radcliffe will disappear into a garret anytime soon. "I sense a burning desire
in him to continue with the theater, to explore what's going on inside him,"
Griffiths says. "He's got all sorts of hidden depths. He's terribly mature
without being remotely boring, and he's extremely complex without being screwed
up. All in all, I think he's in for an enviably interesting life." Griffiths
pauses, then adds in his plummiest, most theatrical voice, "The little
bastard."
"Dark Horse" has been edited for Style.com; the complete story appears in the
September 2008 issue of Vogue.
generally coinciding with the onset of puberty, after which they start to
curdle. There have been notable exceptions, of course—Jodie Foster comes to
mind, and Christian Bale—but by and large, once kids who have grown up in the
public eye stop being adorable, they find themselves trapped by the image of who
they once were and tend to self-destruct or fade away.
Which is what
makes the metamorphosis of Daniel Radcliffe, otherwise known as Harry Potter,
such a neat trick. Since becoming the big-screen incarnation of J. K. Rowling's
bespectacled hero at eleven, the star of the $4.5 billion-grossing franchise has
managed to navigate the Scylla and Charybdis of adolescence and fame to emerge,
at nineteen, a charming and unaffected lad-about-town—almost a leading man but
still, as millions of flushed preteen cheeks can attest, a schoolgirl
heartthrob. His solid turns in last year's coming-of-age drama December
Boys and World War I weeper My Boy Jack boded well for life after
Potter. But it was his much-ballyhooed stage debut on the West End, in Peter
Shaffer's Equus, that let him shed the cloak of boy wizard, stripping
himself bare, emotionally and literally, to reveal a serious actor of
charismatic intensity and depth.
This month, New York audiences will
finally get to see Radcliffe as he reprises his performance, opposite a Potter
costar, the brilliant Richard Griffiths, in the first Broadway revival of
Shaffer's 1973 psycho-religious thriller about a teen who blinds six horses with
a metal spike and the court-designated psychiatrist who tries to discover why.
I meet up with Radcliffe for Diet Cokes one evening at the Soho Hotel in
London, where he arrives straight from the set of Harry Potter and the
Half-Blood Prince. Wearing jeans and a black T-shirt, he is short and
compact, with a lively face and watchful eyes. He is open and affable—clearly
not the clueless Lothario that he played in self-parody on an episode of
Extras, though, he admits, "I'd love to have that blind confidence, that
total oblivion to how the world sees you."
In fact, Radcliffe broods
about how he is perceived, particularly by co-workers. "They're always expecting
some terrible person to turn up," he says. "So you try to make sure that they
know that you're intelligent and not horrible. Then you try to be rugged and
sexy—but only after smart and lovable."
Two other adjectives that come
to mind are hyperarticulate and voluble. Words rocket out of his
mouth in apparent pursuit of his darting, mercurial thoughts, careening, in our
first ten minutes together, from a discussion about New York theater audiences
to a diatribe against bad grammar, a recital of Keats's "Ode to a Nightingale,"
a paean to the Sex Pistols, and an analysis of the Segway scooter as an emblem
of epidemic laziness. "A friend of mine once said, 'God—the things you say!' "
Radcliffe recalls. "I thought, Imagine the things I don't say. You can't
possibly imagine what it's like to actually live inside this head."
As
Alan Strang, in Equus, Radcliffe gets to live inside a very different
sort of mind—tortured and floridly psychotic. Socially awkward, slow at school,
and torn by sexual confusion and Christian guilt, Alan escapes into an
elaborate, self-created religion based on the ritual worship of horses. A stable
boy by day, by night he strips naked and finds ecstatic release astride a
stallion he has dubbed Equus, "the Godslave, Faithful and True." On a collision
course between personal desire and the wrath of a jealous deity, he gallops
toward his terrible apotheosis. "I think that everyone has got more in common
with Alan than they would like to admit," Radcliffe says. "I've never put out a
bunch of horses' eyes, of course, but you turn to your own emotions—the sadness,
the anger, the loneliness—and just explode them."
The only child of
parents involved in the arts, Radcliffe announced at age five that he might want
to be an actor. "My mother said, 'No, you don't,' " he recalls. She finally
relented and allowed him to audition for a television movie of David
Copperfield when he was nine, largely because, he says, "I was having a hard
time at school, in terms of being crap at everything, with no discernible
talent." Radcliffe also suffers from dyspraxia, a developmental disorder
affecting motor skills, and he still has trouble tying his shoes. "I sometimes
think, Why, oh why, has Velcro not taken off?" he says.
His performance
in David Copperfield led to a cameo in The Tailor of Panama and,
eventually, to Harry Potter, a role that has made him a household face and
earned him a fortune. As someone who grew up going to the theater and can hold
forth on the virtues of Sondheim and Mamet, Radcliffe was a natural to make the
leap from screen to stage. "A great play goes beyond anything a film can achieve
because you know that you've seen something special, something that people of
future generations won't see," Radcliffe says. "It's like a live concert—it
happened once, and you were there."
What better way for a young actor to
announce his coming-of-age than by playing a famously troubled boy who hasn't
quite arrived, to say the least. Equus, which ruffled many
psychotherapeutic feathers back in the day for its decidedly ambivalent view of
the talking cure, is the work of a playwright with an eye for spectacle, a
yearning for transcendence, and a gift for turning ideas into the stuff of human
conflict. Like The Royal Hunt of the Sun, Shaffer's 1964 epic about the
Spanish conquest of Peru, Equus is animated by the pageantry of devotion.
It shares with both that play and the later Amadeus a preoccupation with
a big question—How are we to live without a belief in God?—and the clash between
Apollonian reason and Dionysian ecstasy, between mediocrity and genius.
For this new production, the gifted young director Thea Sharrock has
brought back the original designer, John Napier, whose spare, modular set and
iconic metal horse masks and hooves have become essential elements of the play.
"The exciting thing about Equus is that it's completely unafraid to be
theatrical in the most important sense," she says. "Having said that, it's also
an intensely intimate personal drama."
That drama is played out between
Radcliffe, whose character's madness is lit by a spark of the divine, and
Griffiths, whose unhappy therapist, Martin Dysart, envious of the boy's ability
to experience a rapture he will never know, kills his soul to cure his mind,
destroying himself in the process. "This man needs just as much help as the boy
does," says Griffiths, who won a 2006 Tony for The History Boys.
"Spiritually, he's holding himself together with baling wire and duct tape. He's
like the figure in the Stevie Smith poem 'Not Waving but Drowning.' Nobody gets
it—they just wave back at him—and he's left in despair at the end of the play
because he's going to do what society wants by fixing the boy and making him
normal, but he questions whether what society wants is worth a mouthful of
spit."
Radcliffe is eager to get back into the rehearsal room and looks
forward to getting to know New York City. As he once again explores his
character's private passion, he'll continue to explore an obsession of his own:
writing poetry in the classical tradition. "Poetry's this wonderful, sort of
secret thing you've got going that you don't tell anybody about," he says.
"Unless, of course, it's published, or you talk to a journalist about it. Acting
has confines; poetry has none."
Despite his ardor, it seems unlikely that
Radcliffe will disappear into a garret anytime soon. "I sense a burning desire
in him to continue with the theater, to explore what's going on inside him,"
Griffiths says. "He's got all sorts of hidden depths. He's terribly mature
without being remotely boring, and he's extremely complex without being screwed
up. All in all, I think he's in for an enviably interesting life." Griffiths
pauses, then adds in his plummiest, most theatrical voice, "The little
bastard."
"Dark Horse" has been edited for Style.com; the complete story appears in the
September 2008 issue of Vogue.
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Well, I can see it as a musical! If they can do Peter Pan, they can do Harry Potter! 
Anyway, yes, seriously, now I know exactly what you were posting...not HARRY POTTER, but the person who PLAYED Harry Potter...see? I told you I got it now...anyway, yes, I've heard some darn good things about the show and the acting. I would be very interested in seeing it. (I'd also be interested in seeing Harry Potter!) 
