Daniel Radcliffe’s Next Trick Is to Make Harry Potter Disappear
Daniel Radcliffe’s Next Trick Is to Make Harry Potter Disappear
By SUSAN DOMINUS
Before Daniel Radcliffe became the most famous child actor in history, he was just a child: an only child, a poor sleeper, a nonstop talker, a picky eater. He was also disarmingly sweet. In the screen test he took at age 10, in 2000, for the first Harry Potter film, “Harry Potter and the Sorcerer’s Stone,” he smiles brightly, ebullient, his delight in being there apparent; he is concentrating, concentrating so hard at one point that he mouths words under his breath while waiting to deliver a line, but even still, when he does finally speak, he is all natural sincerity. His face is a flawless little-boy face, his eyes huge and cerulean blue. One eye occasionally blinks more slowly than the other, but no matter. He turns, compliantly, this way and that when asked. About four minutes into the footage, someone places the iconic round glasses on him, and there he is: Harry Potter, boy wizard, the chosen one. The adult voice on the video says: “Those look good.”
Within weeks, Radcliffe, officially cast as Harry Potter, was sitting at a news conference before a roomful of cameras and reporters. One of his first questions from the media: “How do you feel about becoming famous?” Radcliffe brightened: “It’ll be cool!” The crowd laughed.
Thirteen years later, on Sept. 2, Radcliffe was on a small boat in Venice, speeding along the Grand Canal toward the Rialto Bridge. The bridge, a 16th-century stone marvel, is one of the biggest tourist attractions in Venice, but on that day, it was merely a convenient viewing station from which wildly waving fans could await Radcliffe’s arrival. Radcliffe was making his way from the Lido, a small resort island that hosts the Venice Film Festival, to a department store that had agreed to publicize, with huge banners, the independent film, “Kill Your Darlings,” that Radcliffe was in town to promote. Young people, mostly girls but a few boys, had been
By SUSAN DOMINUS
Before Daniel Radcliffe became the most famous child actor in history, he was just a child: an only child, a poor sleeper, a nonstop talker, a picky eater. He was also disarmingly sweet. In the screen test he took at age 10, in 2000, for the first Harry Potter film, “Harry Potter and the Sorcerer’s Stone,” he smiles brightly, ebullient, his delight in being there apparent; he is concentrating, concentrating so hard at one point that he mouths words under his breath while waiting to deliver a line, but even still, when he does finally speak, he is all natural sincerity. His face is a flawless little-boy face, his eyes huge and cerulean blue. One eye occasionally blinks more slowly than the other, but no matter. He turns, compliantly, this way and that when asked. About four minutes into the footage, someone places the iconic round glasses on him, and there he is: Harry Potter, boy wizard, the chosen one. The adult voice on the video says: “Those look good.”
Within weeks, Radcliffe, officially cast as Harry Potter, was sitting at a news conference before a roomful of cameras and reporters. One of his first questions from the media: “How do you feel about becoming famous?” Radcliffe brightened: “It’ll be cool!” The crowd laughed.
Thirteen years later, on Sept. 2, Radcliffe was on a small boat in Venice, speeding along the Grand Canal toward the Rialto Bridge. The bridge, a 16th-century stone marvel, is one of the biggest tourist attractions in Venice, but on that day, it was merely a convenient viewing station from which wildly waving fans could await Radcliffe’s arrival. Radcliffe was making his way from the Lido, a small resort island that hosts the Venice Film Festival, to a department store that had agreed to publicize, with huge banners, the independent film, “Kill Your Darlings,” that Radcliffe was in town to promote. Young people, mostly girls but a few boys, had been