The Harry Potter franchise featured the creme of the crop of British acting talent across its eight installments, with Hogwarts home to more famous faces than you can count. So you might think the younger cast, who were turned into household names themselves thanks to the films, were blown away to be working with such big stars. However, The Boy Who Lived himself Daniel Radcliffe has revealed that he was actually too young when he first took on the iconic role to be all that fazed by his acclaimed co-stars.
Radcliffe appeared on The Late Show with Stephen Colbert this week to promote his latest project, TBS anthology comedy series Miracle Workers: Oregon Trail. While speaking with Colbert, the conversation turned to the topic of whether Radcliffe was starstruck by the likes of Alan Rickman (Severus Snape), Michael Gambon (Albus Dumbledore) and Maggie Smith (Minerva McGonagall) during his time in the Wizarding World. The English actor revealed that he never was, except for with one actor.
“Well, now I’m, like, aware of who they are in a much more significant way than I was when I was nine or ten,” Radcliffe said. “At the time I wasn’t starstruck by any of those people. The first person I remember being starstruck by was Gary Oldman, ’cause that was the age when I was aware of who he was and his work and also getting more serious about acting myself so, yeah, before that when you meet someone as a nine-year-old it’s sort of hard to, like, gain starstruckness of them later on.”
Radcliffe first played Harry, in 2001’s The Sorcerer’s Stone, when he was just 11, so it’s no surprise that he didn’t have a huge sense for how celebrated his co-stars were at the time. Gary Oldman, meanwhile, joined the franchise in The Prisoner of Azkaban, which came out three years later when Radcliffe was 14. So it adds up that he would have been starstruck at that age upon first working with the Oscar-winning actor, who starred as Harry’s doomed godfather, Sirius Black.
These days, Warner Bros. is planning on expanding the Harry Potter franchise in various ways, with a HBO Max series officially in development. Daniel Radcliffe has explained that he hopes the show turns out to be based on the Marauders, the teenage group of tearaways that included Harry’s dad James and Sirius. Fans would no doubt love that idea, too. As for whether he could ever reprise Harry Potter, Radcliffe says he’s open to it.
The next chapter in the Wizarding World is Fantastic Beasts 3, coming July 15th, 2022.
