Dan Radcliffe, who has recently finished his stint on Broadway with How to Succeed in Business Without Really Trying, spoke with Parade. The entire article will be out this weekend, but a bit of the interview is online.
In the interview, he talks about his girlfriend Rosie Coker, marriage, religion, The Woman in Black, his fears, and more. Here are a few excerpts:
On marriage.
“I’ve got a great example to look at in my parents, because they’ve been married for at least 25 years and, I think, they were together for about five more before that. So they’ve been together a long time. I wouldn’t recommend anybody marrying an actor, really. [laughs] Of course, there are cases where it works, but I’m an actor and I know what I’m like. Actors and actresses are generally pretty neurotic.”
On his new film, The Woman in Black.
“On the surface it’s about a young lawyer, a widower, who is given a task to collect the paperwork of a recently deceased woman in her house in rural England. He goes and is terrorized by the ghost of a different dead woman. Every character that you meet in the film has been touched by bereavement at some point. It’s character-driven. Stanley Kubrick said that any film about the supernatural is inherently consoling because it implies an afterlife. That’s what our film is about, really. On the surface it’s about being terrified, but actually it’s about love.”
Are you a romantic?
“Yes. I don’t know where my romanticism comes from. My mom and dad would read to me a lot.Treasure Island, Robinson Crusoe, tales of chivalry and knights, things like that. Those are the stories I loved growing up. I still see something very romantic in the world that perhaps isn’t there. I suppose I want it to be the place of knights and that kind of stuff.”
Knights marry princesses. Do you want to get married?
“Yes, absolutely. When growing up, I thought of marriage as being very official, drawing up a contract. It seemed slightly clinical to me. But then you meet somebody that you really love and you think, ‘Actually, I wouldn’t mind standing up in front of my friends and family and telling them how much I love you and that I want to be with you forever.’
Are you in love with girlfriend Rosie Coker? [Radcliffe met Coker, a production assistant, on the set of the last Potter film.]
“Yes, absolutely. When Rosie’s here, every day seems better….I’m not an easy person to love. There are lots of times when I’m a very good boyfriend, but there are times when I’m useless. I mean, I’m a mess around the house. I talk nonstop. I become obsessed with things. This year it’s fantasy football, which means Rosie has to listen to me talking 24 hours a day about this team. ‘Should I take this player out, do you think, darling?’ And she listens to it, and she loves me for my oddness, my awkwardness, all of those things that I hate about myself. She finds them cute. I guess that’s love.”
Why was that?
“I hated dating because I’m crap at it! [laughs] With Rosie, I didn’t know what was appropriate, like on which date you’re supposed to try and kiss her. At the end of the second date I pulled a move out of the Bela Lugosi Book of Woo—I went to kiss Rosie and at the last minute lost my nerve and ended up kissing her neck, which is such a weirdly intimate place to kiss somebody on a second date. Afterward, I texted her, saying, ‘I’m sorry, what I just did probably seems very odd to you.’ Fortunately, she just found it really funny, so she kept coming back.”
You’ve had enormous success for someone so young. Do you fear that it won’t last?
“Yes. But it’s reality, not fear. It will happen, and I have accepted that. In a way it’s a great relief that I will never, ever do a film as successful as the Harry Potter series. But neither will anybody else. [laughs] Or it will take them a long time.”
You can read all of the articles here and here.
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