“What’s your process?”: the most important role of Daniel Radcliffe’s career
It’s a timeless Hollywood story that child stars struggle to be taken seriously when they grow older, as viewers have already come to associate them with less mature roles, and that Daniel Radcliffe has become more than Harry Potter is an amazing achievement.
This struggle is even more extreme for younger actors who attained any degree of fame for a specific part, and there’s no one who was under the spotlight more than Radcliffe. Thanks to the decade he spent on the Harry Potter franchise, he gave global viewers the opportunity to see him grow up on screen in one of the highest-grossing film sagas of all time.
The fact that Radcliffe has managed to move beyond is a testament to his commitment, given that the franchise was a major component in audiences’ lives for ten years. The smartest decision he has made has been to take on the types of strange, idiosyncratic roles that are as different from ‘The Boy Who Lived’ as possible; between playing a farting corpse in Swiss Army Man, embodying the cult singer in Weird: The Al Yankovic Story, taking a turn into horror with The Woman in Black, and winning a Tony Award for his role on Broadway’s revival of Merrily We Roll Along, he has tried everything and everything, and it’s paid off.
It certainly wasn’t a transformation that occurred overnight, as the intensive shooting schedule of the Harry Potter films was maintained so the core actors wouldn’t grow out of their roles and look too old to be playing their characters, which meant Radcliffe and his co-stars had little time in between instalments in the series to work on different projects.
One of his first major outings post-Harry Potter was Kill Your Darlings, a biographical drama in which he portrayed the famous poet and anti-establishment writer Allen Ginsberg, and as enthusiastic as Radcliffe was about working with director John Krokidas, he admitted to being hesitant when the filmmaker asked him about his acting process. According to him, working on Kill Your Darlings introduced him to techniques that most actors would see as “incredibly basic stuff”.
“It was just, like, breaking down a script by wants,” Radcliffe said, “So rather than thinking, I am going to try and affect this emotion, thinking, ‘What am I trying to do to the other person in the scene?'”
It’s hard to describe how massive a change working on other films was for him in the aftermath of a franchise with elaborate sets and extensive visual effects that required a great deal of imagination. Having been stuck in that mode for nearly all of his career, the actor seemed to relish in taking on the types of opportunities he may have been afforded if he hadn’t landed the titular role.
Kill Your Darlings is a good, if not a great film, but Radcliffe’s performance is truly amazing, wherein he managed to identify all of the qualities of Ginsberg that made him such an important cultural figure within the Beat Generation, yet also found a sense of humanity that was relevant to any stories about young people who are finding their communities for the first time.
Although he has understandably found his calling on stage and on television, Kill Your Darlings is enough to suggest there’s a burgeoning film career out for him as well.
