In the Envelope: The Actor’s Podcast features in-depth conversations with today’s most noteworthy actors and creators. Join host and senior editor Vinnie Mancuso for this guide to living the creative life from those who are doing it every day.
Daniel Radcliffe made a promise to himself, somewhere back in the middle of his time playing pop culture cornerstone Harry Potter across seven billion-dollar-grossing films: Don’t Google yourself. “Very often I’ll be doing a press line and I’ll be asked about something, and I’ll have to be like, ‘I literally don’t know what you’re talking about,’ because I am not plugged in,” Radcliffe tells us on the latest episode of In the Envelope: The Actor’s Podcast. Avoiding his own name on the internet has gotten a little harder, of course, thanks to HBO’s upcoming “Harry Potter” reboot.
“With all the new ‘Harry Potter’ stuff, there were definitely some times when I would suddenly see these pictures of these three kids starting their own journey, and it’s very surreal and strange and provokes very paternal feelings in me, even though I do not know these children,” Radcliffe says with a laugh. “I have not met them—and I’ve talked to Emma [Watson] about this a little bit—but I think we all want to reach into the screens and hug them and make sure they’re OK and hope that they have a great time.”
But, he digresses: “The very honest answer is that I went online for the first time when I was like 16 or 17 and Googled myself, and that was my window into, like, never do that.”
Despite complicating his search history, the early “Harry Potter” experience did afford Radcliffe the chance to truly follow his muse in a way many actors couldn’t imagine. That includes everything from his controversial stint onstage in “Equus” and a role as a farting corpse in “Swiss Army Man” to his recent output like the truly hilarious NBC sitcom “The Fall and Rise of Reggie Dinkins” and one-man Broadway show “Every Brilliant Thing.” The former just scored him a Gotham Award nomination, while the latter earned Radcliffe his second Tony nod.
“You go: Right, I’ve been in the most commercially successful thing I will ever be in. So how do you define success now?” he says. “I was very, very lucky early on to [decide that] success is making work that I’m proud of and that makes me happy to do…. Truly that’s the thing most actors spend their entire careers trying to get.”
While the majority of aspiring performers probably won’t land the lead of a global blockbuster right out of the gate, it’s still a mindset worth remembering. “I’m very proud of being in those films. I’m not necessarily proud of my work throughout all of them, but I’m looking on it much more kindly as I get older. But I would look at all my friends who wanted to do Marvel movies or something like that, and I would kind of [think], not why do you want to do that, because I understand that, but I would look at people who were cutting their teeth in amazing indie films and be like, yeah, you’re already, to me, doing the kind of work that is the biggest reward.
“Becoming famous in the way that I was gave me a really good perspective on fame, which is that it should never be the goal,” he continues. “If it happens as a by-product of what you’re doing, great. I can understand people wanting to be rich. That makes total sense. Life without money is really, really fucking hard. But people wanting to be famous I still don’t get.”
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