Daniel Radcliffe doesn’t want to hear if you don’t like Harry Potter
Daniel Radcliffe, who played Harry Potter, is exasperated by people joking that they thought the Potter movies were bad
There are a lot of good reasons to not like the Harry Potter movies: you might find the adaptations uneven over a handful of directors; you might think the creator has abhorrent views; or maybe children’s fantasy just isn’t your thing. But if you don’t like it, you don’t have to announce that to the series’ star, because Daniel Radcliffe does not find it funny.
In a new interview with GQ, Radcliffe says that every once in a while someone (“usually young men”) will approach him and joke, “Loved you in Extras, thought Harry Potter was shit.” Pro-tip, the actor finds this type of interaction extremely annoying: “It’s said to me in a way like ‘We’re gonna be closer after I tell you the truth about how I feel.’ You can feel that, but I’m not gonna be like, ‘Yeah, man!’ It was ten years of my life.”
This isn’t to say Radcliffe is rabid about Potter. (“There was something odd” about the Return To Hogwarts anniversary special, “but it was also genuinely much more sweet than I thought it was going to be,” he shares.) However, he comes across remarkably well-adjusted about his time spent on the film series and the accompanying fame. “You just grow up with a sense of like, ‘Okay, people are aware of me, and I need to think about that.’ And eventually it becomes easier to adapt to,” he tells GQ.
“Sometimes if you’re denying the reality of what’s going on, that can actually make your life harder to live,” he adds. “It took a long time, is what I’m saying. But my late teens or early 20s was where I was like, ‘You have to accept life is gonna be different for you.’”
The former child star is coming off of something of a career renaissance, with a few seasons of Miracle Workers, a role in the blockbuster rom-com The Lost City, and a starring turn in Weird: The Al Yankovic Story under his belt. GQ also teases that he’s written his own comedy screenplay and is open to joining another major franchise, should the right part come his way. “I had this awareness that people expected we would do nothing after Potter—that we would fade away,” he says. “I really wanted that not to be the case, because I knew that I loved it, and I wanted to do whatever I have to do to have a career with longevity.”