How ‘the Michael Fassbender test’ inspired Daniel Radcliffe’s eclectic post-‘Harry Potter’ career
It’s only a matter of months now until HBO’s mammoth Harry Potter reboot hits our screens, and for the first time since 2011, all the talk online will be of witches, wizards, Voldemort and potions. Except that it probably won’t be; what everyone will actually be talking about is whether or not the new Harry Potter actor matches up to Daniel Radcliffe.
Dominic McLaughlin, who is stepping into the big wand-waving shoes, has something of a thankless task ahead of him. If he’s not as good as Radcliffe was in the eight-movie franchise back in the day, then he’ll get pelters for it, and if he is, then people will just say ‘well that’s why they cast him’.
But he will have his work cut out, that’s for sure, because quite simply, Radcliffe is Potter, and probably always will be. Despite a slightly wobbly start in the first film, he grew into the role across a ten-year period in quite spectacular fashion, each movie getting better and better and requiring him to go to darker and darker places, all while trying to do his own growing up in real life under an intimidating global microscope.
In some ways, what was most impressive about how Radcliffe went about handling the attention of leading JK Rowling’s creation was what he did after it had come to an end. He quickly set about taking on roles and projects that were about as far removed from teenage wizardry as you could imagine, from getting his kit off in Equus in the West End, to playing gay radical poet Allen Ginsberg, to a man dealing with grief who wakes up one day with animal horns growing out of his head. And all of this was within two years of the climactic The Deathly Hallows Part II.
Brilliantly, Radcliffe didn’t stop there; if anything, he made the second half of the 2010s even more random when it came to the films he was willing to take on. There was the absolutely bizarre Swiss Army Man in 2016 for a start, the film opposite Paul Dano that saw him play a corpse with excessive flatulence issues, who ends up being ridden around the sea as a makeshift boat.
Then there was the utterly chaotic Guns Akimbo three years later, an underrated, uber-violent action comedy about the live streaming of an underground club that puts on fights to the death in which Radcliffe took on the lead role of a computer programmer who comes round from being knocked out to find he’s had a gun bolted to each of his hands.
It was a complete disaster at the box office, but that didn’t seem to deter the actor from taking on any other strange parts he felt like, and not long after finishing Potter, he told The Guardian about a test he came up with for picking them, inspired by an Irish actor of some distinction.
He revealed: “I developed it with James Watkins, who directed [Radcliffe’s 2012 horror] The Woman In Black, and we call it the Fassbender test. If you’re ever being asked to do anything, you just ask yourself a question: ‘Would Michael Fassbender do it?’ This referred to a moment when I was being asked to do something a bit more corporate than I’d ever done before, and it came down to the Fassbender test, and we thought he wouldn’t do it. It’s a pretty good test for a lot of young actors.”
In terms of what Radcliffe has run through the ‘WMFDI’ test most recently, he’ll be lending his voice to a Netflix animation called Steps out at the end of the year, and will also soon start filming a war thriller called Trust the Man.
