Daniel Radcliffe Has Become One Of Our Most Fearless Actors

By Evan Romano


Daniel Radcliffe doesn’t even take off his jacket if he gets back into.


New York City is in the midst of a "polar vortex," and I’m meeting the man best known for a decade of playing a certain boy wizard in a not-yet-open hotel bar in Downtown Manhattan. He doesn’t drink anymore — and hasn’t for a couple of years — so it’s no surprise to find his coffee waiting for him at a corner table. Whenever he returns from the frozen tundra outdoor, he's dressed casually in jeans, with a beard masking a face instantly recognizable from years of fantasy fiction. Before long, we’re talking about something we have in common: a deep knowledge of film, nevertheless with certain unforgivable blind spots.


“Paul Dano’s knowledge of film is maybe better than any director I’ve ever worked with, like it's extraordinary,” he says, referring to his co-star on 2016’s Swiss Army Man, a career highlight of his from the past few years. “And I just don't have it at all. Like, some days people will direct you by referencing another moment in another film, and the quantity of times that I have to be like oh, I'm so sorry, I’ve never seen Terminator.”


To be fair, Radcliffe's been a little bit busy. He recently finished a run on Broadway in The Lifespan of a Fact, alongside Bobby Cannavale. And between binging podcasts (his favorites include Case File, How Did This Get Made?, and anything from Crooked Media) and reading Japanese author Keigo Higashino’s The Devotion of Suspect X, he hasn’t had much time to catch up on awards season chatter. Though, his preference film of the year is Adam McKay's Vice, starring Christian Bale — “He can play his body like an instrument at this point,” he says — an actor who, like Radcliffe, had to navigate the oft-tumultuous path from child actor to leading man.


To state the obvious: Yes, Radcliffe played Harry Potter, he of the eponymous series of book-based movies that took the world by storm and grossed nearly eight billion dollars. Yet Radcliffe’s post-Potter days have seen him become a unique fixture in today’s Hollywood landscape — with the aid of a massive, successful franchise to begin his career, he’s settled his twenties into a period of experimental, quirky roles. A villainous tech trust-fund kid in a big-budget sequel? Why not. A heartbroken boyfriend who suddenly sprouts satanic horns from his forehead? Let’s do it. A farting, magical corpse that gets ridden like a jetski? Sure.


The latest in this unconventional series is Miracle Workers, a new TBS limited series from writer and creator Simon Wealthy, an advocate to both Saturday Night Live and The New Yorker. Because the de facto ensemble lead, Radcliffe plays Craig, an angel who’s long been churning away on menial tasks in the Department of Answered Prayers for Heaven Inc., A forgotten job in the big company in the sky led by a kooky and unstable CEO, better referred to as God (Steve Buscemi).


It’s an inspired choice, playing an angel — one that his 96-year-old grandmother still doesn't quite understand. "She just laughed at me and mentioned, ‘That's very miscast.’”


Nevertheless Craig is a welcome challenge for Radcliffe, who’s been taking on unexpected on-screen roles since he graduated from Hogwarts. Where Harry Potter saw him evolve from a shy kid into a confident leading man, 2013’s What If saw him as a romantic comedy everyman, and Swiss Army Man saw him… well, play dead, Miracle Workers finds him channeling the most neurotic version of himself. As has become a theme, this is a very different Daniel.


Indie movies are where he's felt the most comfortable these past few years. While smaller films prove much more complicated to fund, they're also where an actor goes to take risks — something he very much wants to do. Last year, he noticed his way into a movie called Guns Akimbo (an absolutely insane-looking film), which, he says, “I'm sure came out of somebody going, ‘Dan Radcliffe doesn't mind crazy shit, let's send him this.’”


If the reputation that he’s cultivated is that he’s interested in different, abnormal stuff, then that’s one he’s happy to own. Yet he also won’t rule out the chance to star in another blockbuster, should the correct one come along, mentioning that it would just be about “waiting for that script to come in where there's something different about it and there's something challenging.” He says that he’s open to any sort of part in that categorize kind of movie. “As long as I don't feel like I'm having to rein myself in to do it,” he adds.


As 2018 saw some of Hollywood's biggest names taking on more nuanced, compelling work in television — Michael Douglas, Amy Adams, and Jim Carrey, among others — it’s no surprise to be able to see Radcliffe land at TBS. However what was it, exactly, that drew him in? The security sure doesn’t hurt. While he’s been attracted to the individual roles that exist in the indie film world, there’s never absolute certainty that those are going to happen. “Until the day before I fly out to begin doing an indie movie, I'm kinda thinking this could may not happen,” he says. “Because I've had that happen before. I’ve had it been a couple of days out before a shooting, and suddenly the complete thing is scrapped.” The safety that comes as well as American television — knowing, mention, each year out that you’re going to be doing this series, on this date, for this period of time — is definitely an attractive excellent to an in-demand performer.


The half-hour workplace dramedy finds Radcliffe appearing alongside Karan Soni of Deadpool, Blockers breakout Geraldine Viswanathan, and, certainly, Buscemi. Should it continue in back of its beginning run, the same cast will appear in entirely new roles in an entirely new story each season — much in the fashion of American Horror Story, or, as Prosperous says over the phone, what Buscemi occasionally does with The Coen Brothers.


(Left to right) Geraldine Viswanathan, Daniel Radcliffe, Steve Buscemi, and Karan Soni of 'Miracle Workers.'


For Wealthy, it was Radcliffe's willingness to completely commit to the ridiculousness in films like Swiss Army Man that made him so appealing to work with. Soon after you play a farting corpse that slowly yet surely comes back to life, it’s hard to imagine much being off-limits right after that.) “When you’re setting something in an absurd world, it’s really crucial to have at your center an actor who can ground it emotionally,” the showrunner says. “I think that’s why so several writers and directors gravitate toward Dan — you need him to ground your world. It’s like a ballast to the absurdity.”


This is most apparent throughout the scene in which Craig shares the story of his hapless time on earth. While his counterparts were gladiators and royalty, Craig was confined to a cave for his entire life, stuck in a crouch, consuming food mud. “I knew that’s the sort of scene that somebody like Dan would happily submit to,” Wealthy says.


Radcliffe takes a moment to say a phrase that James McAvoy, his co-star on 2015’s Victor Frankenstein, likes to use: “character lead.” This comes right after I ask if he could, perhaps, visualize his own career following down the path of character actor. His response is a passionate why not. “There's no reason you can't be a leading man nevertheless also be a character or weird,” he says. “Ultimately, very few folks are leads for their whole career, you know? Ultimately, you turn into [a] character actor somewhere along the line, and thus I'm very excited and looking forward to that happening.”


Once considering a foray down that road, who better to look to than Buscemi? “He's somebody that has become a bonafide A-list star actor whilst never doing anything although really fucking weird, interesting roles,” Radcliffe says of his "fucking awesome" co-star.


it may sound abnormal, however Radcliffe, right now 29, has been acting for two decades. And in that time, he's learned a couple of valuable lessons. “I am never going to sit down and watch a DVD of a film I'm in 20 years from now,” he says. “So ultimately I think the realization that that's the most crucial thing and that in case you don't have a good time making it, then what's the point? You can should make the perfect film in the world and it also goes off and does astonishing things, however if your memory of it was that it was a really unhappy time, then I think it's to be avoided.”


With the success of Potter in his rearview resemble, a growing reputation in the field, plus a varied, peculiar resume within the past a couple of many years, he’s got no reason to work just for the sake of working. “I can do what I want,” he says. “So I should.”