The boy who played Harry Potter is ever grateful for the role that knocked down all the doors for him, but he’s also been busy scrubbing any child-star residue from his acting image, starting with his raw, nudity-requiring Broadway debut in Equus in 2007. He followed that up with the more chipper How to Succeed in Business Without Really Trying in 2011. For years he has alternated between theater (The Cripple of Inishmaan, Rosencrantz and Gildenstern Are Dead) and film (The Woman in Black, Victor Frankenstein), leaning heavily into the dramatic and/or the absurd.
To be sure, if there’s some dark humor to be found, Radcliffe is into it, whether on TV playing a morphine-addicted physician in A Young Doctor’s Notebook or a low-level angel trying to prevent God from ending the world in Miracle Workers—or playing a flatulent corpse in 2016’s Swiss Army Man. He was starring in Samuel Beckett‘s Endgame at the Old Vic in London when live theater and everything else was shut down due to the coronavirus pandemic. Since then, he played the villain opposite Sandra Bullock and Channing Tatum in their 2022 rom-com The Lost City and portrayed musician “Weird Al” Yankovic in Weird: The Al Yankovic Story, a biographical parody film for The Roku Channel.
Sober since 2010, Radcliffe has also been open about drinking to excess back when the Harry Potter franchise was nearing its finish and, already more famous than he ever dreamed, he was anxious about his next step in life.
“In my case, the quickest way to forget about the fact that you’re being watched is to get very drunk,” he said on Off Camera With Sam Jones in 2019.
“And then as you get very drunk, you become aware that, ‘Oh, people are watching more now because now I’m getting very drunk, so I should probably drink more to ignore that more.'”
Radcliffe has been in a relationship with actress Erin Darke since meeting her on the set of 2013’s Kill Your Darlings, in which he played “Howl” poet Alan Ginsberg. In March, a rep for Radcliffe confirmed to E! News that the couple is expecting their first child.