8 Weird Daniel Radcliffe Roles We Never Saw Coming After Harry Potter
It’s oddly fitting that Daniel Radcliffe is returning to our screens in one of his weirdest roles this fall, just in time to get our attention ahead of HBO’s Harry Potter re-gen.
Most sane people on the planet still primarily associate Radcliffe with those movies — and if you needed reminding of how beloved the original films still are, just take a look at some of the trailer reactions that are currently doing the rounds online.
Radcliffe, for his part, has always been a wonderful custodian of that franchise (far better than some, I think we can all agree). He’s also, after some admirable attempts at different paths, settled into a post-Potter career that’s been mostly high on fun, off-beat choices and low on pretense. In the last decade or so, in particular, he's been lending his enduring star power to some of the most eccentric filmmakers and scripts he could find and, by the looks of it, has been having a pretty good time in the process.
The actor’s latest oddball turn comes as the documentary filmmaker Arthur Tobin in 30 Rock co-creators Robert Carlock and Sam Means’ critically-acclaimed NBC sitcom, The Fall and Rise of Reggie Dinkins — a sports comedy starring Tracy Morgan as a football star looking for a comeback, in which Radcliffe, amongst other things, gets to flirt with Megan Thee Stallion.
All of which got us thinking about the other weird roles that Radcliffe has treated us to over the years. In the list below you’ll find eight of the strangest.
Six years before co-winning Best Picture, Best Director and Best Original Screenplay at the Oscars for Everything Everywhere All at Once, Daniel Kwan and Daniel Scheinert (the artists formally known as “Daniels”) fired a warning shot for that film’s weirdness with Swiss Army Man — a debut feature in which a man stranded on a desert island makes fast friends with a farting corpse.
Paul Dano stars as the living, breathing side of that duo, but it was Radcliffe’s casting (and oddly touching performance) as the flatulent cadaver that really earned this film its buzz at the 2016 Sundance Film Festival and beyond. If you dig EEAAO, it’s well worth seeking this one out — and in terms of Radcliffe’s future weird career choices, it’s going to take some beating.
The first bit of evidence that the Harry Potter star would be willing to wager his stardom in the name of comedy came when he was just 17-years-old — somewhere in between Order of the Phoenix and Goblet of Fire.
The show, of course, was Ricky Gervais’ Extras — which, whatever you might think of the comedian now, did give us some of the funniest TV moments of the ‘00s. Radcliffe’s turn in Season 2 Episode 3 — in which the child star played a hilariously inexperienced and hilariously horndog version of himself — was chief among them.
One of the more recent examples of Radcliffe’s willingness to jump into bizarre roles came in Eric Appel’s Weird: The Al Jankovic Story — a tongue-in-cheek and very-not-factual biopic in which the legendary, accordion-playing, spoof-hit generator actually becomes both a sex symbol and the greatest musician on earth.
If you appreciate musical biopic comedies that don’t take themselves in any way seriously (think Walk Hard or Popstar: Never Stop Never Stopping), this might be up your alley.
By 2013, Radcliffe was two years clear of Deathly Hallows: Part 2 and ready to try his hand at a bunch of different roles. In that year alone, he played the beat poet Alan Ginsberg in Kill Your Darlings and made a charming attempt at being a rom-com leading man opposite Zoe Kazan in What If. For the purpose of our list, however, his most important movie that year was Horns.
For this rather dark fantasy thriller, which was based on Joe Hill’s novel of the same name, Radcliffe plays a young man who is wrongly accused of murdering his girlfriend and so starts to grow a pair of horns that give him dangerous, supernatural powers. Heather Graham (Boogie Nights) and Juno Temple (Ted Lasso) both feature, but keep an eye out for a then 13-year-old Sabrina Carpenter in one of her first ever movie roles.
Jason Lei Howden made his name in the industry as a visual effects artist at Peter Jackson’s Wētā FX studio, where he worked on everything from the Hobbit trilogy to Shang-Chi, and The Beatles: Get Back. To date, his most prominent feature as writer-director was 2019’s Guns Akimbo, in which Radcliffe plays a programmer who gets unwillingly recruited to take part in a brutal death match that’s live-streamed on the dark web.
There are elements of Squid Game and The Running Man to that set-up, but Lei Howden’s tastes are more gruesome and action-forward than either of those popular movies — so, if you’re in the mood for watching the Boy Who Lived mow down a lot of nasty people with guns that are literally bolted to his hands, you’ll probably get a kick out of it.
The biggest trick that the NYSM movies ever played was managing to improve the central antagonist at each time of asking, even as the films got increasingly messy. Last year’s trilogy-closer, Now You See Me: Now You Don’t, wasn’t particularly good, but it boasted an insanely fun turn by Rosamund Pike as an evil South African diamond dealer — as if there were any other kind.
Radcliffe’s turn as the megalomaniacal tech-bro Walter Mabry in Now You See Me 2 wasn’t quite on Pike’s level, but it was a great chance for the usually heroic star to sink his teeth into a mustache-twirling bad guy role. The movie was marginally better, too.
I can’t say for certain that Aaron and Adam Nee, the alliteratively-pleasing sibling directors of Band of Robbers, were thinking of Radcliffe’s performance in NYSM2 when they cast him as the deliciously eccentric billionaire, Abigail Fairfax, in their 2022 romp The Lost City — but I’m guessing there’s a pretty good chance.
The film is a rollicking attempt to upgrade the odd-couple adventure movies of the 1980s (think The Jewel of the Nile and Romancing the Stone) for the present day, with Sandra Bullock and Channing Tatum playing an adventure novelist and her himbo cover model. The story kicks into gear when they’re hired by Radcliffe’s deceptively villainous Fairfax to find a mythical burial chamber that he believes is full of gold. Various shenanigans ensue.
Before landing his role in The Fall and Rise of Reggie Dinkins, Radcliffe collaborated with Carlock and the great Tina Fey (who also acts as producer on the new show) on Kimmy vs. The Reverend, an interactive follow-up special (ala Black Mirror: Bandersnatch) to The Unbreakable Kimmy Schmidt — their screwball comedy show about a doomsday-prepper-sex-cult survivor with a relentlessly sunny disposition (Ellie Kemper) who comes to live in New York city.
For this feature length choose-your-adventure style episode, Radcliffe once again went for humour as Prince Frederick — a man who is both Kimmy’s fiance and a virgin, as well as a school friend of Kim Jong Un, and also 13th in line to the throne of England. As is usually the case with Radcliffe these days, Hogwarts is a distant memory.
