Daniel Radcliffe has cast off boy wizard Harry Potter to play the voice of the 1950s Beat Generation in his new movie Kill Your Darlings – a seductive tale of friendship, gay love and even murder.
Everybody wants to have as diverse a body of work as they can possibly have, and that’s what keeps the people interested in your career
Radcliffe, 23, plays poet Allen Ginsberg aged 17 – a young, naive and closeted teen who struggles to find his place in the world years before the sexual and cultural liberation brought in by the 1960s.
As Ginsberg enters Columbia University in New York, his encounters with fellow mavericks Lucien Carr (Dane DeHaan), William S. Burroughs (Ben Foster) and Jack Kerouac (Jack Huston) bring about a new vision – the founding of the Beat Generation.
Indie film Kill Your Darlings premiered at the Sundance Film Festival to critical appraise this week and was purchased by Sony Pictures Classics for wider distribution later this year.
After 10 years and eight Harry Potter films, Radcliffe is also looking for a new place as an actor, appearing on stage in 2007 in London and New York in the drama Equus, in which he appeared fully nude, and musical How to Succeed in Business Without Really Trying in 2011.
Kill Your Darlings sees Radcliffe pushing boundaries again as Ginsberg comes of age, including a raunchy sex scene with a man.
“Everybody wants to have as diverse a body of work as they can possibly have, and that’s what keeps the people interested in your career,” said Radcliffe.
“There’s a lot to live up to, in the sense that you’re playing someone so well known, and who is revered by so many people.
“But we’re not making a reverential film about him in any way,” he added of his role as Ginsberg.
Hollywood entertainment public-ation Variety said Radcliffe gives a performance to fully “banish any semblance of Harry Potter from the big screen”.
The Hollywood Reporter review noted a scene in which Ginsberg “decisively embraces his sexuality. This will likely be viewed as a major step for the actor towards distancing himself from the Harry Potter image”.
Radcliffe joins a long line of actors who have portrayed Ginsberg on film, including Ron Livingstone in 2000’s Beat and James Franco in 2010’s Howl.
“I purposely stayed away from other portrayals of (Ginsberg) because I find I am a terrible mimic, so I didn’t want to end up doing an impression of James Franco doing Allen Ginsberg,” he said.
Radcliffe added that while the film shows the four men who went on to create a literary and cultural revolution in America, the story is not solely about the birth of the Beats.
“It’s about showing how much fun they had and how they sparked off one another, and it’s that energy and vitality that launched the Beats,” Radcliffe said.
Director John Krokidas said Ginsberg’s story was central to the film because he had the biggest personal journey. “At the beginning of the film he’s very much the dutiful son ... but he never shows who he is inside, because he’s taking care of everyone else,” Krokidas said. “By the end of the film he becomes the rebel, he proclaims himself as a poet and finds his own voice.”