Daniel Radcliffe has escaped the shadow of Harry Potter, here's how
He just won a Tony Award for doing Sondheim on Broadway, but the man behind Harry Potter has been doing surprising, bizarre work for many years.
Daniel Radcliffe will never be able to escape Harry Potter. His decade embodying the most famous teenage wizard in movie history will inevitably loom large over his entire career. But that career, crucially, now includes a Tony Award.
The 34-year-old's recognition for his performance as Charley Kringas in the Broadway revival of Stephen Sondheim musical Merrily We Roll Along feels like a culmination of his post-Potter career. It has been 13 years since Radcliffe hung up his magic wand and, in that time, he has made plenty of bold and unconventional choices.
Radcliffe is a prime example of a star who embraced the freedom his success gave him in order to pursue the sort of projects that few have the chance to do. He has done a handful of blockbusters, but most of his work has been in smaller, more independently-minded movies. And some of them have been brilliant.
Saying goodbye to Hogwarts
Fittingly given his Tony success, Radcliffe's first post-Potter job was in a musical. Having already wowed theatre audiences with his work in a 2008 West End revival of Equus, which subsequently transferred to Broadway, Radcliffe took again to the New York stage for a revival of How to Succeed in Business Without Really Trying. The production opened in February 2011, running alongside the July premiere of the final Harry Potter movie.
But that's not to say his acclaimed stage work stopped him appearing on the big screen. In 2012, he took his first lead movie role since Potter when he led the genuinely chilling haunted house horror The Woman in Black. It was a statement of intent for Radcliffe, showing he could hold a film together on his own as an adult leading man. It hit big at the box office, earning back almost 10 times its production budget.
Read more: Daniel Radcliffe’s The Woman In Black the most complained about film of 2012 (Yahoo Entertainment)
It wasn't all plain sailing, though. Radcliffe's next brush with blockbusters was in Paul McGuigan's box office disaster Victor Frankenstein, in which the famous story is told from the perspective of Frankenstein's assistant Igor — played by Radcliffe. It was a dull, unimaginative movie that tried to do for Shelley what Guy Ritchie's Sherlock Holmes films did for Conan Doyle.
Read more: The History of Frankenstein on Film (IndieWire)
Radcliffe failed to make an impact and the movie sunk like a discarded cadaver at the box office. But, speaking of discarded cadavers, something interesting was happening to Radcliffe's career.
Weirder and weirder
Just a couple of months after Victor Frankenstein stunk out the box office, a new Daniel Radcliffe movie premiered at the 2016 Sundance Film Festival. In that movie, Paul Dano plays a man who is saved on the verge of taking his own life when he discovers a corpse on a desert island. The corpse is Daniel Radcliffe. The movie is Swiss Army Man. It's nothing you've ever seen before.
It's difficult to sum up Swiss Army Man in a paragraph. Dano and Radcliffe are both terrific in conveying the tender friendship that builds between the living man and his dead buddy, while there's also a scene in which Dano rides him like a jet ski and several in which the corpse gets an erection that can be used as a compass.
Read more: Daniel Radcliffe, Paul Dano Talk ‘Swiss Army Man’ Walkouts (The Wrap)
As well as a terrific showcase for its leading men, the film fascinated the internet and put its pair of directors — known simply as Daniels — on the map. Six years later, their next film — Everything Everywhere All at Once — arrived in the world and became a hit, subsequently winning seven Oscars. They're now in-demand directors, but their starting point was a deceased, aroused Daniel Radcliffe.
Radcliffe made some fascinating choices during this period, in which he essentially disappeared from mainstream movies. He was soulful and nuanced as poet Allen Ginsberg in Kill Your Darlings and impressive — despite a ropey American accent — in the underrated fantasy-inflected mystery film Horns. Radcliffe also proved an effective romcom lead, appearing alongside Zoe Kazan in the genuinely delightful What If — also known as The F Word.
Then, things quietened down a little. Radcliffe continued to make interesting choices, taking on against-type lead roles in the likes of Imperium, Jungle, and Beast of Burden. But these roles failed to make the impact that his early post-Potter work had done.
The answer, as it turned out, was to go even weirder.
Weirdest
In 2019, Daniel Radcliffe played James Bond. Well, sort of. He provided the voice for the 007-like spy Rex Dasher in Playmobil: The Movie. Ignore the 18% approval score on Rotten Tomatoes; the film is a blast and features Furiosa star Anya Taylor-Joy on top form in the charm stakes.
Read more: Playmobil: The Movie star Daniel Radcliffe on why he turns down 'big action movie' roles (Yahoo Entertainment)
The same year, Radcliffe made something a lot less family-friendly. In the riotous action-comedy Guns Akimbo, Radcliffe portrays a computer programmer who finds himself inserted into a real-life death match — with guns bolted to each of his hands.
He also starred in four seasons of the TBS comedy series Miracle Workers, in which each season saw him play a different character in locations as varied as the Dark Ages, an angelic bureaucracy, and a post-apocalyptic nuclear wasteland. That show also gave us a truly unforgettable musical sequence. You can see why this man won a Tony.
Watch: Daniel Radcliffe shows off his dance moves in Miracle Workers
In 2022, Radcliffe landed a double whammy of hits in characteristically weird fashion. He menaced Sandra Bullock as eccentric billionaire Fairfax in action-adventure romp The Lost City and then played a man with "weird" actually in his name in Weird: The Al Yankovic Story.
Read more: Daniel Radcliffe explains why he loves playing weirdos (Yahoo Entertainment)
A lifelong Weird Al fan, Radcliffe gave everything to his portrayal of the accordion-playing parody singer in a "biopic" that at most flirted with reality before veering off into Madonna romance and a shootout against Pablo Escobar. It was one of the best comedies of 2022 and rightly won the Primetime Emmy Award for Outstanding Television Movie.
Thanks to its debut on the Roku Channel, it didn't win the audience it deserved, but it's now streaming on Prime Video, which should give everyone the opportunity to discover Radcliffe's crowning oddball achievement.
But throughout all of his big and small screen oddities, Radcliffe has been building a stellar stage career. He led Tom Stoppard's classic Rosencrantz and Guildenstern Are Dead at The Old Vic and worked with Martin McDonagh in The Cripple of Inishmaan on both the West End and Broadway.
And now, starring alongside Jonathan Groff — who also won a Tony at the weekend — in Merrily We Roll Along, Radcliffe has received the greatest awards recognition of his career to date. We don't know what he'll do next, but it's a safe bet that it'll be weird. We wouldn't have it any other way.
