Daniel Radcliffe talks tackling gay sex scenes in biopic Kill Your Darlings

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Exclusive: “It’s beautiful and tender”

In issue 212 of Total Film magazine we take you behind the scenes of the shotgun shoot that saw Daniel Radcliffe take on his first genuinely grown-up role.

“I felt like I was breaking new ground,” says the 24-year-old Hogwarts alumnus, playing controversial Beat poet Allen Ginsberg in an indie drama about the scandal that rocked Columbia University in the summer of 1944.

“Most actors grow up doing a lot of small movies and then get something big, but I started on the biggest film in the world. So it’s an experience that I haven’t had. I’m sure some people will be slightly… err… startled by the gay sex scene though…”

With Dane DeHaan (soon to be seen as Harry Osborn in The Amazing Spider-Man 2 ) playing his lover, Lucien Carr, rumours are rife that some of the intimate scenes will make Hermione blush.

“It’s actually not graphic,” laughs Radcliffe. “You don’t actually see anything. What’s graphic is the emotion of the scene. It’s a very vulnerable, slightly afraid moment. It’s beautiful and tender as a consequence of that.”

Picking up Ginsberg’s story before he was famous, Kill Your Darlings follows him through his college days discovering the New York boho scene and meeting the other cool kids and hep cats that went on to shape a generation with their freewheeling lifestyle of sex, drugs and experimental poetry.

Kill Your Darlings opens in the UK on 6 December 2013.

For more from Radcliffe, pick up the brand new issue, which is out 27 September 2013, and include The Hobbit: The Desolation of Smaug and There and Back Again, Warcraft and many more - taking a close look at Marvel's second Phase II outing, Thor: The Dark World .

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