Daniel Radcliffe’s ‘Playboy’ Interview

Yesterday Playboy released a 20Q interview with Daniel Radcliffe, centred around his role as Harry Potter, his personal life and beliefs, Victor Frankenstein, Equus and the price of fame.

Here’s some of the Potter highlights from the interview!:

Q1
You were 12 years old when the first Harry Potter film came out. At what point did you realize the role was going to follow you for the rest of your life?
It may have become clear to me only in the past few years. In your head, you imagine it will all go away once the series is over. When I was first going out to bars and pubs, I was trying to pretend I could have a normal existence. Then you realize that people know who you are, and when you’re in a bar they take out their camera phones. Eventually you accept that you have to adapt how you live.

Q2
The Potter series is over. Has the attention gone away?
It feels like I get recognized more now. Here’s what’s scary: If you were 14 when the first film came out, you’d now be almost in your 30s and could well have a child under 10 whom you’re now introducing to Harry Potter. We’re already getting the next generation. That’s just bizarre. It’s never going away.

Q3
Why hasn’t the appeal faded?
Because the stories are great! A huge part of our culture now is that if something becomes successful there’s a backlash. Harry Potter didn’t have that. There are people who don’t want to read it, but the number of people who actively dislike it is very low. The books are great, and they came along at the perfect moment, when there was a fear, because of the rise of computer games, that reading was going to become a thing of the past. When kids suddenly found these books, it was something everyone could get behind as a global populace.

Q8
You’ve said that your performance in Harry Potter  and the Order of the Phoenix, the fifth movie in the series, was your best, but you hate watching yourself in the sixth, The Half-Blood Prince. How did your best and worst performances come back-to-back?
In every movie up to the sixth one, you can see a big step forward in my acting. And then it stopped, or went backward maybe, in the sixth film. I really enjoyed my performance in the fifth—part of it was how much I worked with people like Gary Oldman and David Thewlis. On the sixth, I remember watching it and thinking, Wow, there’s been no growth. You’re watching a mistake you made every day for 11 months—that’s the way I saw it. I had the idea that Harry was like a soldier traumatized by war, and as a result of that, he shuts down emotionally. That’s not a bad idea, but it’s not the most interesting thing to watch for two and a half hours.

Q13
You’ve focused mainly on low-budget independent films since playing Potter. Will people ever not think of you as Harry?
One of the positive by-products of celebrity culture for actors like me who’ve been stuck with one character for a long time is the opportunity for people to get to know me. I don’t think Mark Hamill, for example, had the same opportunities for people to get to know him. When I went on Jimmy Fallon and rapped a Blackalicious song, I got a job off that—playing Sam Houser in Game Changer, the movie about Grand Theft Auto. It made the guy in charge go, “Oh, he’s interested in hip-hop. He’s not just a typical posh white boy.”

The full interview can be read here.

Victor Frankenstein – Daniel Radcliffe’s newest appearance as Igor – is released on November 25th. Watch him talk about this role at Comic Con here!