The Tony winner on his audience-participation play 'Every Brilliant Thing,' sharing Broadway with his 'Harry Potter' pal Tom Felton, and why he’s done talking about J.K. Rowling.
Dressed casually in jeans and a jumper—what we Americans would call a sweater—“Dan,” as he introduces himself, settles onto a gold velvet couch in the recently renovated Hudson Theatre’s Ambassador Lounge to tell me all about returning to the same venue where just a few years ago, he played nebbish Charley Kringas opposite Jonathan Groff’s Franklin Shepard in a hit revival of Merrily We Roll Along.
Both Groff and Radcliffe won Tonys for their work. While Groff didn’t hesitate to do another show right afterward—a “psychotic” choice, Radcliffe jokes—his costar took some time off post-Merrily. “My kid was starting school,” Radcliffe says. “I could be there for drop off and pick up and all that stuff. It was just a very nice, sedate beginning of the year.” But while he’d initially intended to take more time off, Radcliffe also learned an important lesson from his theatrical elders about how hard it is to do theater when your kids enter elementary school. “You miss them during the day when they’re gone, and then they get home at night and you are not there. You just do not see them for six days a week,” Radcliffe says. “Right: I should probably make a bit of hay while the sun shines, when he’s only doing half days.” Duncan MacMillan and Jonny Donahoe’s Every Brilliant Thing is “brilliantly structured,” says Radcliffe. . The show involves heavy audience participation, asking playgoers to perform roles including Radcliffe’s therapist and his love interest. For those who suffer from stage fright, don’t worry: Only people who say they want to perform are asked to. This results in a mixed bag. Some participants seem genuinely shocked to be onstage with Radcliffe; others may have a few UCB classes under their belt, and are perhaps a little too comfortable. As the play’s nameless protagonist, Radcliffe has the difficult task of being both its emotional engine and its conductor, leading the laypeople through their cues. “The cool thing about doing the show is it exposes you to how brilliant people are—how kind, how lovely,” he says. “We love it when people get up and are funny or smart. But you can feel everybody tuning into the fact that really, the only thing everyone needs to be is kind. If they do that, the show flies.” Despite being one of the most recognizable movie stars of his generation, Radcliffe is exceedingly approachable in the show—a regular guy in a grey waffle-knit shirt and jeans—that he sets the audience at ease, making it possible for this wild immersive experiment to work. “To be able to just be me and free and easy with so many people, and not have a hat on and be trying to hide myself,” Radcliffe says, “is such a liberating, fun thing.” Maybe occasionally too liberating. At the preview performance I attended, one audience member was so moved that they shouted something out during what’s arguably the emotional climax of the show. “It was very sweet,” Radcliffe says, defending the faux pas. “I was trying to find a way through the next part of the speech to touch base with him and be like, ‘You’re good, man. It’s a lovely instinct. It’s just not what the story is doing right now.’” It’s a tall order to mix two oft-maligned genres of theater: the one-person show and immersive theater. Radcliffe knows this: “I like to think that everyone starts off being like, Oh God, what the fuck is this? What am I being asked to do?” But even the most stage-averse among us should leave Every Brilliant Thing feeling if not fulfilled, at least celebrated. “I can basically promise everybody that they will get a round of applause at some point during the night,” he says. “I think everybody has a good time.” Dealing with such heavy subject matter night after night has opened Radcliffe’s eyes to the ways in which the people try—and often fail—to talk about depression and suicide. “I think there needs to be a word—and maybe there is a word—for the thing where you start looking at something and then it comes up naturally, organically, in your life, all the time.” There is a term for that—it’s called the Baader-Meinhof phenomenon—but Radcliffe isn’t wrong to feel that this subject is especially topical. Both of us have recently read stories about public figures who died by suicide. “The news on TMZ—you see people reporting the ways it was done,” says Radcliffe. “And if not publishing suicide notes, then publishing what last texts were. Of course, people who were connected to it want to talk about the person that they knew. But it is also in the media. I know that TMZ is not where you could look for restraint in these times, but it still does have an effect.” In the play, Radcliffe’s character makes clear the dos and don’ts of reporting on those who take their own lives. Don’t say someone has “committed” suicide, as though it were a crime; don’t use sensational headlines; don’t speculate as to why someone did it. “We deal with this incredibly badly,” Radcliffe says. He hopes Every Brilliant Thing will make it easier to talk about suicide, and do it the right way. “It’s actually kind of like a polemic,” he says of Every Brilliant Thing. “A plea for people to rethink how we talk about this stuff.” The more he talks about theater, the more animated and excited Radcliffe gets. In these moments, it’s easy to forget you’re not talking to a run-of-the-mill adult theater kid. During our conversation, Radcliffe, too, seems to forget that he once played the most popular fictional character in modern history, accidentally divulging information he’d rather keep close to his chest. “I think from the time that I started acting, it was very much like, Oh, and one day I’ll do that,” he says of theater. “I just don’t think I thought I would start as early as I did.” That’s putting it mildly. By the time Radcliffe was 12 years old, he was an international superstar fronting a billion-dollar franchise based on the novels by J.K. Rowling. More recently, Rowling has become notorious in progressive circles for her negative attitude toward the trans community, using her personal wealth to establish the J.K. Rowling Women’s Fund, whose website says it “offers legal funding support to individuals and organizations fighting to retain women’s and girls’ sex-based rights in all aspects of life including the workplace, sports and clubs, and protected single-sex spaces.” Radcliffe has spoken out about Rowling in the past, saying that her comments have made him “really sad.” “Transgender women are women,” Radcliffe said in 2020, via the LGBTQ+ suicide-prevention group the Trevor Project. “Any statement to the contrary erases the identity and dignity of transgender people and goes against all advice given by professional health care associations who have far more expertise on this subject matter than either Jo or I.” Rowling, in turn, has made her animus for Radcliffe and his Harry Potter costar Emma Watson well known, ridiculing them on X by calling them “celebs who cosied up to a movement intent on eroding women’s hard-won rights.” When I ask Radcliffe about the public response to his previous statements about Rowling, things get a bit tense. He demurs, politely explaining why he’d prefer not to speak about her. “The reason I don’t talk about it anymore is because I’ve said what I want to say on it,” he says. When I point out that I can understand that it might be a thorny subject for him—Rowling’s pivot to avowed anti-trans rhetoric—he corrects me. “To me, it’s not been thorny,” he says. “It’s been a simple thing to talk about. It’s been very easy for me to talk about.” The problem, to him, isn’t his position. It’s this: “You will write a really nice article about this interview and then nobody will talk about anything from it because it’s just giving the Daily Mail pull quotes. And I really hate giving the Daily Mail pull quotes.” The world Rowling created is inescapable. A few blocks from where we’re sitting, Harry Potter and the Cursed Child just celebrated its seventh year on Broadway, and recently welcomed a new cast member in Tom Felton—who played Draco Malfoy to Radcliffe’s Harry in the film series. Although his old costar is just around the corner, Radcliffe has yet to see the production, and doesn’t foresee taking a day off from Every Brilliant Thing to catch a matinee of Cursed Child. “I have told Tom I’m unlikely to, purely because watching that show in a sea of Harry Potter fans seems like the most stressful couple of hours that I could possibly have,” Radcliffe says. “Nothing sucks more than people watching you watch something. And I feel like there would be a bit of that.” Still, Radcliffe is thinking of ways he can catch Felton’s Broadway debut. “We do have some stagehands in common who have been helping us load in. Maybe I’ll try and sneak in and see through some weird vestibule at the background, sneak into the spotlight booth,” he says. Note to Times Square pedestrians: If you see a big, human-size box rolling into the Lyric Theatre, leave it be. In any case, he’s chuffed that he and his old friend are experiencing the same thing at the same time. “Me and Tom have been talking about how crazy it is that we met 26 years ago and are now both a stone’s throw from each other on Broadway,” says Radcliffe. On that note, Radcliffe also has a bone to pick with some media outlets about how they’ve reported on his relationships with his Harry Potter costars in the past. “I was really annoyed. lovely enough to come to the premiere of Merrily, and the way the world reacted was like, ‘It’s the first time they’ve seen each other in 14 years,’” says Radcliffe. “Like, no, it fucking isn’t.” He’s getting a bit heated. “You don’t know our lives. We’ve met tons of times in between. I have probably seen Tom more than I’ve seen any other individual cast member. There’s some crew members that I’m very, very close to, but I’ve seen Tom a huge amount in between.” Radcliffe plays Arthur Tobin, a disgraced documentary filmmaker following Jordan’s also disgraced former NFL star as he mounts a comeback . After Merrily, it’s Radcliffe’s second metaproject about the trials and tribulations of making art. “The commonality is actually the neurosis of creative people, which is why I’m good for those parts,” Radcliffe says. “Charley’s neurotic brain, and the nervous desperation that Arthur sits in constantly—they’re modes that I can sit in very easily. It’s not hard for me to become a nervous, pretentious English director.” While the new show premiered around the same time as Every Brilliant Thing, Radcliffe doesn’t plan on watching it anytime soon. “It has traditionally been a really bad thing for me to do,” he says of watching his own work while he’s actively performing. Still, he’s close to the Reggie Dinkins cast, which has plans to come to Every Brilliant Thing. Radcliffe already knows exactly what brilliant thing he’s going to make Jordan shout out from the audience: “spaghetti bolognese.” He’s laughing at the very thought of it. A decade and a half has passed since Radcliffe’s last Harry Potter film, Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows Part II. New Potter-based projects are beginning to emerge: Audible has announced a full-cast audio production of all the books featuring more than 200 actors, including Hugh Laurie, Riz Ahmed, and Matthew MacFadyen. Perhaps more trippily for Radcliffe, HBO is making a new Harry Potter series based on the books that will star John Lithgow as Dumbledore, Paapa Essiedu as Professor Snape, and newcomer Dominic Mclaughlin as Harry. It’s time for Radcliffe to pass the baton—or the wand. “I think I’m in a nice place with it now. Where you’re like, Huh, isn’t that funny?,” says Radcliffe of the new projects. “What a strange thing to have something that was such a huge part of my life for so long, and now it’s something that other people are doing.” He understands that this muted reaction may be surprising to those who expect him to be more territorial about the series. But Radcliffe is being genuine: “I had watched enough versions of Sherlock Holmes by the time I was pretty young to know that’s the destiny of this character,” Radcliffe says. “It’s going to be played by tons of people in different interpretations. We’ve seen three Spider-Mans in my lifetime. It’s very unlikely that we’re going to just see one Harry Potter.” And he’s more than okay with that. In fact, it might even be helpful. “I think I will be actually delighted if my son can watch a version of the thing that is not me,” Radcliffe says. “I think he’d probably prefer that.”
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