While Daniel Radcliffe may still be best known around the world for playing The Boy Who Lived, anyone who has followed the actor's post-Potter career will know how, erm, weird some of his recent projects have been. Just look at his latest movie, literally titled Weird, which tells the life story of Weird Al Yankovic. Kind of. As you would expect from the master parody maker, it's not exactly your usual biopic.
That's not the only slightly wild career decision Radcliffe has made – he previously played a farting corpse in Swiss Army Man, had guns for hands in Guns Akimbo, and portrays an evil billionaire collector in The Lost City opposite Sandra Bullock and Channing Tatum. So, how does the actor go about choosing his next role?
Sitting down for a wide-reaching career interview with Total Film, Radcliffe answers that question. "There's no specific criteria," he says in the new issue of the magazine, featuring Enola Holmes 2 on the cover. "If a script has a really great premise then that will obviously immediately make me sit up. The films I've chosen: they have this premise, and then they fully explore it. That is something that will always hook me into a script. They don't come along often. It's very hard to do. I'm not looking for comedy out and out, necessarily. But even [thriller] Imperium [in which Radcliffe played an undercover cop in a white supremacist group], which is absolutely the furthest thing from a comedy, is witty. I feel like that's probably something that's a through-line in most of the things I do."
Radcliffe adds that he only takes on projects that he feels he can bring something fresh to. "I used to get sent a lot more actiony stuff, and I don't particularly buy myself as that guy," he says. "The reason I ended up doing Guns Akimbo was because I absolutely can buy myself as this nerdy guy. It's not just that I buy myself, but will an audience go there with me? If you cast me as Jason Bourne, I, as an audience member, would have questions."
As his career has continued, Radcliffe has indeed leaned more towards comedy, but his confidence needed to get there first. "One of the things that was hugely helpful in becoming more confident in doing comedy was doing a musical on Broadway," he says. "I was learning a lot. Because towards the end of Potter, I'd become so... When you're a teenager, and you become very self-conscious, a lot of the time I really hated what my face did. So my choice was, 'I'll just make my face do less and less.'
"When I was doing the stage show, I had a realization: 'My face is sometimes very expressive, and that's not something to be shied away from. Any natural weirdness that you have is an asset.' I'm not saying you should make faces and nod to the audience. But you can be a bit freer, and actually that's going to be helpful, and
not something to run away from."
You can read much more from Radcliffe in the new issue of Total Film when it hits stands (and digital devices) this Thursday, October 13. The issue also houses our in-depth interviews with the Enola Holmes 2 cast, and our features on The Banshees of Inisherin, Black Panther: Wakanda Forever, and Bill Nighy's Living.
And if you’re a fan of Total Film, why not subscribe so that you never miss an issue? You’ll have it delivered to your door before it’s in shops, you’ll save money on the cover price, and you’ll get exclusive subscriber-only covers. Plus, with the current offer you can get a free pair of EarFun headphones worth £55. Head to MagazinesDirect to find out more (Ts and Cs apply).
