Test 1
Daniel Radcliffe
I first meet Daniel Radcliffe at the offices of his agent, just before he takes to the stage for an evening performance of The Cripple of Inishmaan. He's wearing tight jeans, no glasses, and is a super ball of energy. He is extraordinarily polite, slim, well turned out. If you'd never seen him before, you might assume he was a children's television presenter. But at the age of just 24 he has 16 movies behind him, eight of them Harry Potter blockbusters. It feels as if he's been with us forever. The funny thing is, apart from the facial hair, he doesn't really look any different from the school boy wizard who made his screen debut in 2001.
Yet over the past half-dozen years, it seems he has done everything he could to distinguish himself from Harry in the parts he has chosen to play. Radcliffe disagrees with this, saying 1 pick films based on scripts and directors and parts. I'm not interested in making films I've seen before. There's nothing more exciting to me when I read a script than originality. That's all it's governed by, there's no master plan to distance myself from Potter.
He says he doesn't want to sound ungrateful. I know that Potter is going to be with me for the rest of my life, so to try to stop people talking about that any more is stupid. It's just a fact of your life, so you can't get annoyed by it. You have to accept the fact that you were involved in this incredibly cool thing and though you might not always be happy with the work you did on it, the opportunity it has given you to make a career for yourself is amazing.
Was he aware how much Harry would change his life when he was offered the part? 'No, I knew I was signing on for the first two, that four books had come out. Warner, the film company, genuinely didn't know at that stage if they were going to make more than one film. If it flopped, then they certainly weren't going to put up all that money again.' Did he ever consider exercising his opt-out clause? 'By the third film, I thought if there's a time to get out, it's now; there's still enough time for another actor to come in and establish himself. For a while, I thought, if I do all of them, will I be able to move on to other stuff or should I start doing other stuff now? But in the end I decided I was having way too much fun. And actually there aren't many great parts out there for teenage boys, certainly not as good as Harry Potter.
Nowadays, of course, he is incredibly wealthy. I ask whether he sometimes worries people might socialize with him purely because of that. He laughs and says people are going to be sadly disappointed if they befriend him for his lavish spending. Anyone who is my friend knows that I don't spend money. So they can hang around with me as much as they like and they still aren't going to get anything. Haha! But, he says, he has never had a problem with working out who to trust. I’m a fairly good judge of character, and I have a small but very close circle of friends. I'm not looking to recruit new friends, though I'm actually very open with people. I had a similar conversation with myself when I was about 17, the first time somebody had really betrayed that trust, and I said to myself you have two options: you either become totally insular and shutdown and not let anybody into your life ever, or you can continue to be open and amiable when you meet people and trusting, and occasionally get hurt. And I do think that is the best way.
