“I got to feeling like people were watching to see if we just flamed out or actually managed to go on to do something. And I didn’t know the answer at that moment, and not knowing the answer to that question made me feel like a bit of a fraud, I guess."
-Daniel Radcliffe
By Tom Swift
Staff Writer
You’re 11 years old and a guy with both the means and the credibility offers you the chance to be world-famous and so wealthy you won’t have to work a single day of your adult life.
That is, after you make eight movies, during which you will give up the balance of your childhood, put your capacity for anonymity at risk for the foreseeable future, and forego any semblance of teenage normalcy.
Do you take that deal?
I am among few members of my age cohort never to have read a single chapter of a single Harry Potter book.
I haven't watched a Harry Potter movie.
I have not been to The Wizarding World of Harry Potter.
I did work in a bookstore during a Harry Potter midnight release party or two. Otherwise, the Harry Potter phenomena pretty much passed me by.
Yet, as I started reading “After Potter,” an essay by Chris Heath in the June 2024 issue of The Atlantic, I found that, like a J.K. Rowling reader, I couldn’t put it down.
Heath’s piece is well written and its subject, the actor Daniel Radcliffe, comes off as a compelling person. Yet this isn't why I was riveted. I was hooked by the essay's opening scene.
The reader is placed in the moment when Radcliffe, the boy who played Harry Potter in the Harry Potter movie series, was faced with that decision: Do you want to be the living-breathing version of an über-popular, generational character?
Of course, anyone reading these words today is doing so well after the age of 11. Undoubtedly, too, the question is merely theoretical. We cannot not impose our adult understanding (both its openness and its limitations) as we contemplate the question — a question an 11-year-old can’t reasonably answer with any conscious sense of what it will mean for the rest of their life.
At 11, we don’t know who we are or what we want (aside from maybe a big bite of sugar and a bundle of fun). Here Radcliffe was making a choice that might sound easy — he’s being offered what many people spend their lifetimes chasing — but was fraught with peril.
You’ll be fucked up, they said. There is much evidence to suggest this line of thinking wasn’t off base. This is hardly the best example one could cite — in fact, it seems more childhood stars than not struggle following on-screen fame — but I once found myself at an after-hours concert in which a thirty-something Macaulay Culkin was anything but home alone. He played as a member of a parody band that sang Velvet Underground covers transposed with pizza-themed song names and lyrics. There was no sign of Joe Pesci.
You’ll never have a career, they said. How would Radcliffe know he wanted to be an actor the rest of his life? Or even for the year it took to make the first film? How many kids play soccer then pick up the violin then give both activities up for a career as a skateboarder? Even if Radcliffe did know he wanted to be an actor (at 11!), wasn’t Harry Potter the ultimate set up for one to be permanently typecast? After all, we’re talking eight movies over what proved to be 10 years. Who would ever again look at Radcliffe and not see circled specs and feel nostalgia for another time, one full of wonder and excitement for a simple, delicious pleasure that can’t be lived again?
Who am I?
It’s a central question of life. For many of us, it’s not easily answered. At least not by us.
Other people, people known and perceived, people related and not, offer us answers. We get answers from society, siblings, real friends, Facebook friends, parents, guardians, teachers, coaches, billboards, advertisements, movies, books — the list is long. Our identity may be handed to us. Yet we inevitably ask: Is this really me?
If we don’t know, we apply identifiers we do know so as to have something to hang our hats on.
In today’s world, with a dearth of geographic community and in a mass culture that is diffuse and free from shared experience (free from shared hardship), many identify themselves by their melanin, their gonads, their sexuality.
What we do is big, too. I’m someone who — .
I like dive bars.
I’ve been to six continents.[1]
I’m a fan of the New York Jets.[2]
What we care about comes into play. I support social justice — .
I stand with Ukraine.[3]
All Are Welcome.[4]
I foster prairie dogs.
What we do for a living is an obvious badge of identity.
I'm a project manager.
I am a strategic consultant.
I am a realtor.
I’m in HR.
Various philosophies tell us that, actually, there is no Self. The Self, they say, is an illusion. Besides, life is transitory. We shouldn’t attach ourselves to any sort of self-image because before we know it, we’ll go back to being dust in the wind.
This makes some sense. Except, of course, when the mortgage comes due.
Forgive my being flip about the non-Self. It’s a worthy point-of-view to consider.[5] Especially when we’re looking in the mirror. Even so, most of us do have an innate longing to be someone, something, for it’s through identity that we feel seen and heard. That we feel we belong.
Tell an 11-year-old who will soon become aware that rides in a big, new amusement park will bare his likeness so other kids might pretend to be the person the 11-year-old pretends himself to be — and, in his case, much of the industrialized world sees him as — and the No-Self concept isn’t likely to stick.
Maybe if you are inclined to acting as a profession you have built-in ability to detach from roles. Maybe in that case you like duality. Maybe being someone else for a while is no different than changing your trousers.
But, again, Radcliffe was 11. He was 12. He was 14. He was 18.
If most of us struggle figuring out who we are, Daniel Radcliffe had a unique challenge in this regard. It’s easy to minimize the possible downsides; we think money negates more than it can. No doubt, I wish I didn’t have to work. I'd go to therapy every day if that's all it took.
Yet most of us do best when we apply ourselves to something that either is or is very similar to a job. People who can’t work wish they could. People who don't have to work often still do. Money is only part of the equation. We don’t want to watch TV all day every day. Not really.
Turns out, Radcliffe didn’t make it through the Harry Potter years unscathed. The article takes up some trouble he had with alcohol – according to the essay, he’s been sober 10 years now – yet he seems to have come out the other side of the storm of the publicity and privilege and fortune in a place where he knows who he is and what he wants out of life. He has played a stage actor on Broadway. He has taken roles in films, including esoteric films just to learn the craft. He’s a father. He has a longtime partner. He stays mostly away from red carpets.
“When Radcliffe emerged from the Harry Potter chrysalis,” Heath writes, “he did not want to stop working. He knew that some things were immutable. ‘Harry Potter is going to be the first line of my obituary’ — but if that was the context in which his life would now continue, it needn’t limit it."
So Radcliffe worked — hard. "I wanted to try as many different things under my belt," he says, "knowing that it was going to be the accumulation of all of those things, rather than one thing, that would actually sort of transition me in people’s minds."
In accepting the role of Harry Potter, Radcliffe was not exactly stepping into harsh life circumstances. This was hardly a case of child impoverishment. He lived, more or less, on a movie set with a big budget and many happy people who treated him well. At home, he had, by all accounts, well-adjusted, loving parents (two parents, we might add) who neither coddled him like a movie star nor pushed him beyond what is possible. He wasn’t a Pinocchio being made to make the family riches.
His parents, who had done some performing themselves, took him to an audition to break him out of a rut. Young Daniel proved naturally good at acting and this led him to get on the radar of Christopher Columbus, the director of the Harry Potter movies who had reviewed thousands of applicants, known and not, looking for an unstated quality that he saw in Radcliffe and no one else.
So much good fortune — greater than lottery odds or, if you believe in such things, destiny came into play. The question was tough but it did seem like life was giving him clues that he could handle it all.
Yet what must that be like to go through all of one’s formative years playing a single other person – a character, a boy, in some ways just like you and, yet, in other ways, engaged in a world more fantastic than reality – as you go through all the profound physical, mental, emotional, and biological changes that come with the transformation from child to adult, from boy to man?
How hard would it be in such circumstances to discover yourself and be you? On some level, wouldn’t you come to believe you are that other person? Might you not want to be that other person? Since, on some level, that other person is a hero that inhabits a seemingly flawless world. At the least, isn’t it possible that the line between you and your character would have been blurred? Acting: It’s the job of being that which you are not. Of course, many kids do that job and do it well. However, few of them play the same character for a decade — growing up that person, being identified, acclaimed, mobbed in airports as that person. It all must shape and distort one’s sense of Self in ways in which few of us could identify.
“When the Potter movies ended,” Radcliffe says in the essay. “I got to feeling like people were watching to see if we just flamed out or actually managed to go on to do something. And I didn’t know the answer at that moment, and not knowing the answer to that question made me feel like a bit of a fraud, I guess. I think I just carried that all around with me in a way that was just very present in my day-to-day life and thinking in a way that is, thankfully, not as much now.”
A magazine profile is a sort of snapshot. For a movie star, such a snapshot is, to some degree, curated. The journalist only can do their part to show what’s real. Especially when the profile is of a trained actor, we can’t read eight pages and think we know all there is to know. Radcliffe’s now in his mid-30s. Who knows what’s ahead that stems from what's behind? What seems true today is that he’s carving out a career that isn’t about the next easiest payday. He seems to have not only survived Harry Potter but also answered those two questions: no, he’s not fucked up and, yes, he does have a career.
Again, I haven’t seen Daniel Radcliffe as Harry Potter. But however good he is in that role, to find himself as an adult making his way in the world and not as a poster-child for how not to spend your formative years, that has to be the greater achievement.
[1] You’d know this, by the way, if you followed me on Instagram.
[2] If so, my condolences.
[3] After all, don’t you see the sign in my lawn, which, by the way, was just treated so stay off until it’s dry — will ya?
[4] Except those who voted for the other team.
[5] Thought experiment: Is it better to have no identity than to have one imposed on you at an early age?
