The exact moment Jamie Lee Curtis predicted Daniel Radcliffe would be Harry Potter: “You look like that kid”
There aren’t many casting calls in history that have been more expansive and intensive than the search for a preteen boy to play Harry Potter within the first adaptation of JK Rowling’s novel series.
It wasn’t a case like James Bond or Batman, where multiple actors were expected to play the role over the course of just one generation – Rowling’s novels were still hitting bookshelves, but Warner Bros knew that it had a potentially seismic blockbuster series on its hands that could rival Star Wars and Jurassic Park.
Finding a child actor is no easy task, considering that the casting of Harry wasn’t just for one film; Chris Columbus and the other producers needed to find an actor who could grow up with the role and develop into a mature adult performer, as they needed someone who would be willing to dedicate a decade of their life to just one franchise.
While there were many actors who read for the role, Radcliffe’s casting proved to be one of the best decisions in cinematic history. He evolved with the role and was able to show the different stages of Harry’s maturation as the films got darker.
The frenzy to find someone to play Harry was intensified because most child actors didn’t have a wealth of experience to draw from, and thus could not be assessed based on their previous performances. However, Radcliffe had been doing an impressive amount of work before Harry Potter and the Philosopher’s Stone, and had even played the son of Jamie Lee Curtis’ character in the 2001 film The Tailor of Panama.
Curtis only had positive things to say about Radcliffe, and indicated that she had predicted that he would land the role playing ‘The Boy Who Lived’.
“Daniel had to wear a fake tan because he was very pale, and we were supposed to live in Panama, and all the kids were in the pool,” Curtis said. “He couldn’t go in the pool because he had a fake tan, and I remember he was sitting by the pool and I looked up at him at one point and I went, ‘Wait, you know, you look like that kid who’s on the cover of that book.’”
Curtis and Radcliffe have had surprisingly similar careers, as they both got an opportunity to prove that they were capable of more than the one role that they were most famous for. Curtis was often typecast in other ‘Scream Queen’ roles after her iconic part as Laurie Strode in the original Halloween, but she was able to expand her filmography by branching out to do more comedy parts. Curtis even won an Academy Award for a performance in Everything Everywhere All At Once that couldn’t have been more different from what she did in Halloween.
Radcliffe made an interesting move to spend his post-Harry Potter career on Broadway, although he did work with Everything Everywhere All At Once directors Daniel Kwan and Daniel Scheinert on the fantasy comedy Swiss Army Man. Although Racliffe has been incredibly gracious to the cast of the new HBO Harry Potter series, he’s carved out an impressive career for himself that is entirely distinct from his work in the Wizarding World.
