Daniel Radcliffe has spent the last decade cultivating a reputation as one of the most interesting, committed, and daring young stars in the industry, but that doesn’t mean it didn’t come as a shock when he was announced to be playing the title role in biopic WEIRD: The Al Yankovic Story.
Then again, maybe we shouldn’t have been all that surprised when Radcliffe has long since shed his Harry Potter persona to play such disparate and diverse characters as a farting corpse, and undercover agent infiltrating a white supremacist group, a South African political prisoner, a drug-running cargo pilot, a man who unwillingly gets guns bolted onto his hands, and much more.
Shooting is now underway on The Al Yankovic Story, and the first set photos of Radcliffe in character have been revealed. As you can see below, he certainly looks the part, and we’ve got no reason to believe that he won’t deliver a performance to match.
While you could argue that he looks a little more like prime-era Gene Shalit than Weird Al, a re-telling of Yankovic’s life story is surely destined to have an offbeat, perhaps even surrealist vibe, so it’s not as if the project is going to live or die by way of 100% accuracy.