Dan Radcliffe Discusses “A Young Doctor’s Notebook”

Oct 13, 2012

Posted by: Mel

Radcliffe

The Guardian has a new interview up with Daniel Radcliffe, where he talks a bit about his upcoming series, “A Young Doctor’s Notebook.” Radcliffe discussed the amount of gore that will be present in the series:

Acted with a degree of slapstick and gore, the adaptation includes a tooth extraction from hell, an eruption of pus like a water cannon from an infected eye, and that horrific leg amputation, with a blunt saw.

Radcliffe admitted: “The amputation was rough, you see me hacking away.” He added: “I am an obsessive Bulgakov fan, since I read the book when I was 18. It is so compelling and exciting. This is his first book, and he can’t help his own crazed imagination coming through. At the first meeting Jon and I had, I said, yes, let’s do it.”

As for the gore, Radcliffe said: “That had to stay. It is pretty graphic in the book, and you can’t do justice to it without that. By episode four we were running out of blood.”

Radcliffe also talked about his interaction with Jon Hamm’s character:

The conceit of the comedy is that Radcliffe plays the young doctor, while Hamm, 41, is his older self, who tutors him and plays to his deepest insecurities. Hamm’s version “voices all the neuroses of the young doctor, he becomes the voice in his head”, explained Radcliffe.

Radcliffe’s character is straight out of a top Moscow medical school and assigned to a remote hospital, where he is the only doctor for miles. He is often on the edge of panic, inexperienced in the realities of medicine.

“He has learned his medicine in books; he is confronted with the reality,” said Radcliffe. Or, as his character observes by episode two, being a doctor is a mix of “butcher and seamstress”.

Hamm dispenses sardonic advice, for example, on how hard it is to amputate a crushed leg, but also starts to display the drug addiction that undermined the real life career of Bulgakov. The writer became addicted to morphine to dull the pain of a wound sustained around 1917.

You can read the rest of the article here. “A Young Doctor’s Notebook” will premiere on Sky on December 6th.





The Leaky Cauldron is not associated with J.K. Rowling, Warner Bros., or any of the individuals or companies associated with producing and publishing Harry Potter books and films.