Daniel Radcliffe Was Expected to Take Tom Felton’s ‘Heartthrob’ Status After This ‘Harry Potter’ Movie
Daniel Radcliffe already reached a certain level of fame after doing the first couple of Harry Potter movies. But there was one film that was supposed to mark his transition from child star to heartthrob.
What Daniel Radcliffe thought of being a heartthrob
Filmmaker Chris Columbus saw the Harry Potter stars’ growth up close. He directed two of the series’ movies in Sorcerer’s Stone and Chamber of Secrets. According to Columbus, the actors matured greatly between the first and second films. Because of this, the filmmaker felt that there would be a change in heartthrob status between two of the franchise’s leads.
“In the last film the heart-throb was Tom Felton who played Draco Malfoy, everybody loves a bad boy, right.” Columbus once told Times (via Irish Examiner). “In this film it’s going to be more over to Dan. He’s really matured as an action adventure hero so in that respect he’s a much stronger presence”.
But Radcliffe never considered himself much of a heartthrob. Even in his older years.
“If girls like me, it has not been proven yet,” Radcliffe once said according to West Australia. “OK, I go to the red carpet in Tokyo and thousands of girls scream at me… but the me that sits in a darkened room watching cricket for eight hours with a bowl of pasta in his underwear and socks is not quite so attractive to girls.”
Daniel Radcliffe named the 1 ‘Harry Potter’ co-star he considered a true heartthrob
There was another former Potter co-star who Radcliffe considered more of a heartthrob. The actor worked alongside Robert Pattinson in Order of the Phoenix.
After his brief inclusion in the Potter franchise, Pattinson would go on to star in the Twilight franchise, which expanded his popularity. Radcliffe once heard that Pattinson believed the Weird Al star was a bigger heartthrob. But Radcliffe at the time couldn’t have disagreed more.
“I don’t have his number, so haven’t spoken to him [about any advice]. But I can safely say that his insisting that girls would choose me over him, that they would not,” Radcliffe once said in an interview with MTV News. “That they do not. He is much prettier and can be much more charming. And he can do that thing of being sultry and sexy. Rob can just sort of stand there and look at something and start to smolder. And I just can’t do that.”
Ironically, Felton also once shared that his newfound ‘heartthrob’ status helped him very little with other girls growing up.
“Some people really struggle with the idea that I wasn’t this special, popular kid, but I was walking around with dyed hair and played an evil wizard. It wasn’t cool. It did me no favors with the girls,” Felton once told The Guardian.
Daniel Radcliffe wondered why he wasn’t considered a conventional rom-com lead
After his Harry Potter run, Radcliffe branched out into a variety of roles in the film industry. One of his projects was the rom-com What If, where he co-starred alongside Zoe Kazan. While doing press for the movie, Radcliffe was frequently being told how much of an unconventional lead he was for a romantic comedy. He’d heard the term so much that he became genuinely curious about how the term applied to him.
“And so eventually I got bored of hearing that and kind of picked someone up on it, so I was like ‘What about me is unconventional, exactly? Like, tell me.’ And she said, ‘Well, I think it’s probably the fact that you know, we associated you with playing Harry, the young boy wizard,’” Radcliffe once told the Associated Press.
But Radcliffe felt that his former Harry Potter co-star Emma Watson challenged that theory.
“My immediate response to that was: ‘Well, the male population had no problem sexualizing Emma Watson immediately,'” he said.
