Daniel Radcliffe isn’t sure how much longer people are going to talk about Harry Potter—or insist that his career is hurt by the franchise’s popularity.
“I feel like everyone wanted Potter to be more of a handcuff than it actually was,” he said in an interview with Yahoo! News. “I think Harry Potter is going to be around for a while—a long while—but as long as it doesn’t inhibit me getting parts in the present time, then it’s fine. It’s a lovely association to have, because it’s something I’m incredibly proud of.
“People always say, ‘Don’t you just want to forget about it?’ No! That was my entire adolescence.”
Next up, Radcliffe will star in a new play, The Cripple of Inishmaan, on the West End. “I think one of the hilarious things about this play is, by our standards today, how politically incorrect it is,” he observed.
The actor knows a thing or two about pushing boundaries, as evidenced by his nude scene in 2007’s production of Equus. He saw the play as “a signal of intent as to what I wanted to do. I didn’t just want to take an easy way out of this. I wanted to really try and take risks and make a career for myself.”
Radcliffe chooses his projects, including the upcoming film Kill Your Darlings, by using one specific method. “It’s very basic,” he said. “It’s just what excites me. It’s what gets me interested. Hopefully later on this year people will start to see some very different performances from me. And hopefully some really good movies. It’s about the movie as a whole, not just people studying my performance and seeing how I’m getting different and how I’m growing up.”
Another way Radcliffe is pushing himself is by receiving inspiration from The Cripple of Inishmaan.
“I’m trying to write something at the moment, and it’s just so dark, and I think it’s funny, but I’m not sure if anybody else ever would,” he said. “I aspire to be a poor man’s Martin McDonagh [the playwright behind The Cripple of Inishmaan.]”
The play will open in June for a 12-week run.
