Daniel Radcliffe Stopped Partying With His ‘Harry Potter’ Co-Stars to Be Taken Seriously as an Actor
Daniel Radcliffe didn’t mind partying with his fellow Harry Potter castmates on set. But there came a point where the actor left that lifestyle behind for the sake of his career.
Daniel Radcliffe always wanted to be a good actor
Radcliffe knew early on that he didn’t want the Harry Potter franchise to be the pinnacle of his career. Even while filming the wizard series, he was doing projects like Equus to further branch out his portfolio. This was in line with the actor’s idea of success, which he equated to a satisfying acting career.
“I’ve learned that the only definition of success that can matter is your own. Everyone seems to think that I’ve been completely successful and I can just stop now,” Radcliffe once said on George Stroumboulopoulos Tonight. “There’s an attitude that success equates to money and if you’ve done that young then you’ve been successful. I actually don’t think that’s how I regard myself because I regard success as becoming a better actor with every job I do. I regard success as a career with longevity.”
Radcliffe was willing to make certain sacrifices to achieve his goal. At the time, the Harry Potter alum was used to partying and drinking with his co-stars. But he wanted to distance himself from those activities to further hone in on his acting.
“I used to play a lot of pranks in the past but I want to be a more mature, serious actor now,” he once said according to Stuff. “I don’t get involved with drinking or partying with the cast anymore.”
When Daniel Radcliffe realized that he wanted to keep acting
Although Radcliffe was already a working actor since the first Harry Potter film, it wasn’t until later on he was committed to the profession. He credited working with the likes of Gary Oldman in the Harry Potter series for motivating him to continue acting.
“Those moments were…it was definitely around that time, working with Gary,” Radcliffe once told Collider. “And also, the confidence that Gary gave me, because he was really supportive and really great to work with. I thought, ‘I want to work with more people like you. I don’t want to walk away from this. I don’t want this suddenly to end and suddenly for me not to be in this industry.'”
Radcliffe was so eager to further spread his wings as an actor that he considered quitting the Harry Potter franchise early to do so. But he asserted it was a brief thought before he decided to stick with the franchise.
“By the third film, I thought, if there’s a time to get out, it’s now; there’s still enough time for another actor to come in and establish himself,” Radcliffe once told The Guardian. “For a while I thought, if I do all of them, will I be able to move on to other stuff or should I start doing other stuff now?”
Daniel Radcliffe almost quit acting before being cast as Harry Potter
Radcliffe almost quit his iconic series before he was brought on board. Casting director Janet Hirshenson reflected on the difficulty of casting Harry Potter in the first place. J.K. Rowling had a set of strict requirements for the film’s potential star. Apart from the author’s insistence that Harry Potter was British, Rowling was also adamant about the actor having green eyes.
“For Harry, to complicate things, I needed a blue or green-eyed kid because part of Harry is his green eyes or blue-green, but they couldn’t be brown eyes, so that was another elimination thing. We said, ‘Oh, drat! He’s great, but he has brown eyes,’” Hirshenson remembered in an interview with HuffPost.
Radcliffe seemed to deliver a great audition and met all of Rowling’s physical requirements. But before screening for the part, Radcliffe was ready to give up on an acting career.
“He didn’t want to be an actor anymore,” Hirshenson said.
Eventually, Radcliffe was persuaded by the movie’s filmmaker and producer to join the franchise.
“One evening, David Heyman the producer went to the theatre and he knew Daniel’s father, who was an agent…so the producer ran into Daniel and his dad and said to Daniel, ‘Why don’t you come in and audition? Think about it.’ So he said, ‘Ok,’” she said.
