Dear Daniel Radcliffe,
I get it. You’ve made your point in recent interviews: You don’t want to succumb to Luke Skywalker—er, Mark Hamill, Syndrome and be associated with a famous franchise for the rest of your life.
It’s an admirable ambition for someone whose name and face are near synonymous with a certain boy wizard’s—admirable that you don’t want to rest on your millions of dollars’ worth of laurels; ambitious because, well, you’re Harry Potter. And it’s going to take more than a few magic words to make that disappear.
With every post-Potter project you’ve undertaken, you’ve tried to show us a Dan Radcliffe we’ve never seen before. In the case of your latest movie “What If,” it’s as the lead in a romantic comedy.
But offscreen, it’s the Dan Radcliffe we’ve heard before, time and again, for the past three years, insisting that your Potter days are far behind you and frustrated at constantly being linked to the series. A bit of advice: As you continue your struggle to be seen as a Serious Actor, please leave the “I’m not Harry Potter” soundbites at home.
Take it from someone who’s had a crush on you since “Prisoner of Azkaban”: I too am ready to see you as someone other than Harry. But that transformation has to happen onscreen, not in the pages of newspapers and magazines. Your media campaign to distance yourself from the part that made you rich and famous walks a fine line between smart career move and dumb alienation of the movie-going masses.
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Before you become the Actor Formerly Known As Harry Potter, remember this: Though you were the one donning the glasses, Harry Potter is more than just one person. It’s all the high schoolers who argued with their parents to let them stay out on a school night for the first midnight showing. It’s college students not studying for finals and instead hosting an epic movie marathon/drinking game. It’s an entire generation who can identify a “Harry Potter” movie based solely on your haircut.
If casting directors and movie producers can’t see past the spectacles and lightning-bolt scar, remind them: Harry Potter is more than just one person. It’s the crowds that turned up to the Mexico City premiere of “What If,” causing the event to be canceled due to safety concerns. It’s the fans who broke through barricades at the Venice Film Festival while you promoted “Kill Your Darlings.” It’s the audiences who rang up $7.7 billion at the box office to make “Harry Potter” the most successful movie franchise of all time.
Maybe no one’s ever said this to you, but thank you for being Harry Potter. I really hope it isn’t as much of a cross to bear. You already have quite a few things going for you, but if some people always see you as Harry Potter, maybe that’s not so bad after all.
Sincerely and … call me maybe?
Elise
P.S. I’m glad you said “never say never” on returning to Harry Potter in the future. After all, Mark Hamill went back to a galaxy far, far away.
Elise De Los Santos is RedEye’s copy editing wizard, and she really wants to win a bet she made that Daniel Radcliffe will win an Oscar in the next 15 years.