From wizard to lawyer

For more than a decade, Daniel Radcliffe was known the world over as the owlish waif in the massively successful Harry Potter films – based on the equally popular book series by J.K. Rowling.

I think I have to accept that for some people I’m always going to be Harry Potter

Now, the young actor is turning a page.

A child prodigy no more, the 22-year old Mr Radcliffe now is stepping out in grown-up film roles. His first post-Potter film, which opens this week, is the neo-Gothic horror movie The Woman in Black.

Mr Radcliffe said that he fell in love with the script, which he read for the first time just a few hours after shooting the last frames of his final Harry Potter film.

“It was such a brilliantly written script,” he said.

“Normally, if you get a script which has a lot of stage directions, it can be quite hard to read, but I just flew through it – it was so frightening. You could tell it was going to be scary,” he said.

“That was for me the principal reason to do it,” said Mr Radcliffe. “It was a really compelling story.”

The Woman in Black – a co-production between Canada, Britain and Sweden, directed by British film-maker James Watkins – debuted last Friday throughout North America and opens in Europe this week.

A supernatural thriller set in the 1920s, the film is about a young widowed lawyer sent to an eerie estate to settle the affairs of a recently deceased dowager.

He begins to investigate the mysterious drowning years earlier of the elderly woman’s young son and uncovers the startling mystery of numerous unexplained deaths of young people in the neighbouring village.

Mr Radcliffe said he was drawn to the project not just by the script, but also by the message that underlies the grim storyline.

“It’s about how death and grief affect people in different ways,” he said. “It’s a horror film, but driven by characters.”

The role is a huge departure from his persona as boy wizard in the eight-film, billion-dollar Potter franchise, but it allows him to make a clean break and avoid the peril that faces all successful actors – becoming typecast as their last character.

“I think I have to accept that for some people I’m always going to be Harry Potter, some people will never want to see me in other ways,” he said.

“But you know, some people already see me as just an actor, and so I just have to keep trying to make people see me as a true actor and not as a character.”

He feels surprisingly little grief about laying the boy wizard role to rest, and is determined to mix it up as much as he can – trying as many different types of roles on for size as he can.

He acknowledged that relinquishing Harry Potter will be neither quick nor easy.

“I think I’m going to be breaking away for probably the next years. I think it will take a little time for people, to say, ‘Oh, he has now established himself in a career outside Potter’,” he said.

“That’s what I want to do, and that sort of takes time,” he continued.

“It’s going to be a combination of two or three years’ hard work. If I succeed in that, I have confidence that I will.”