Listen: How Broadway Made Daniel Radcliffe a Better Actor
By Gordon Cox
LOS ANGELES (Variety.com) – Acting onstage has been a regular part of Daniel Radcliffe’s career for more than a decade — and the “Harry Potter” star says there’s a good reason for that: It’s made him better.
“It gives me a lot of confidence as an actor, which is not always something that I’ve felt,” Radcliffe said on the latest episode of Stagecraft, Variety’s theater podcast. “I feel like doing theater, doing ‘ Equus ‘ and ‘ How to Succeed [in Business Without Really Trying ‘ and all those things, it was really very important for me psychologically. There’s something about doing it without an editor to save you, or a myriad of things in post-production that can help you out, something that made me go: ‘Okay, I can act.’ I’ve grown a little bit as an actor every time I’ve gone back to the theater. I think it makes me better to do it.”
Theater was one of the things that helped Radcliffe, currently starring on Broadway in the timely new comedy “The Lifespan of a Fact,” step easily out of the shadow of Potter. But then, he never really thought his association with the bespectacled boy wizard had held him back or pigeonholed him.
“Not professionally, at all,” he said. “There were moments when probably I coped with the personal effects of ‘’ not as well as I could have. But professionally, no.”
Although some in Hollywood might have been wary of casting Radcliffe in roles that were wildly different from Harry, just as many were “excited at the opportunity to show a different side to this person or this actor. There are directors that were, I think, excited to — I am quoting one of them here and I won’t say who — ‘reinvent’ me.”
Also on the latest episode of , Radcliffe talked about the political resonance of fact-checking in “Lifespan,” stood firm on his choice not to see the hit “Harry Potter and the Cursed Child,” and gave a definite answer to the question of whether he’d ever appear in another Broadway musical.
New episodes of “ Stagecraft ” are available every Tuesday. Download and subscribe to “ Stagecraft ” on iTunes , Stitcher , or anywhere finer podcasts are dispensed. Find past episodes here and on Apple Podcasts .
