Daniel Radcliffe may have spent the last decade reinventing himself as one of the most interesting and exciting young actors in the business, tackling a series of roles that you’d never expect the star of a multi-billion dollar blockbuster franchise to go anywhere near, but for the rest of his days he’ll always be defined by the Harry Potter series.
Not that there’s anything wrong with that when the literary phenomenon still means so much to so many people, no matter how many times creator J.K. Rowling lands herself in hot water with the fans, and spending a decade literally growing up on the screen in front of audiences around the world makes it almost impossible for any of the young cast members to shake their association with the property.
Radcliffe, Emma Watson and Rupert Grint eventually comfortably settled into their roles, but it wouldn’t be unfair to say that in the first few movies, the trio didn’t showcase the most natural of acting abilities. Of course, that’s to be expected when three kids are plucked from obscurity and thrown into one of the biggest productions in Hollywood history, and the former Boy Who Lived still finds his performances to be a source of embarrassment, as he revealed in a recent interview.
“It’s hard to separate my relationship with Harry from my relationship with the films as a whole. I’m incredibly grateful for the experience. It showed me what I want to do with the rest of my life. To find out early on what you love is really lucky. I’m intensely embarrassed by some of my acting, obviously, but yeah, it’s like asking, ‘How do you feel about your teenage years?’. There’s so much in there that it’s almost impossible to single out one feeling.”
There were a lot of folks predicting that Radcliffe may well have faded into obscurity after the end of Harry Potter, but he’s since blown those notions clean out of the water, with the 31 year-old here to stay. He might never have to cringe at his own acting again, but the eight blockbusters are still rewatched on an annual basis by millions of fans from all corners of the globe.
