“Got your phone?” asks Daniel Radcliffe with that innocent smile of his. “I’d like to look at it.”
“OK,” I say, “but I’ve got to put in my code. I’m very security conscious.”
He takes it from me and, after a few quick taps, starts calling up intimate details of my private life. “Actually,” he says, “you’re not security conscious at all.”
No, the actor formerly known as Harry Potter isn’t some sort of celebrity hacker or inveterate snoop. On this sunny L.A. morning, we’re discussing his new play, Privacy, which premieres at New York’s Public Theater on July 5 and runs until August 14.
A reworked and Americanized version of the 2014 hit at London’s Donmar Warehouse, Privacy stars Radcliffe as a British writer in New York trying to make sense of one of our age’s defining issues—how technology keeps shifting the dividing line between public and private life. Created by the playwright James Graham and the director Josie Rourke, the team behind the original production, this revamped play addresses everything from Edward Snowden’s NSA leaks to whether you really ought to post that slightly risqué photo on Instagram. “Basically,” Radcliffe says, “it is about Google and Apple and what it means to be a private person today.”
Privacy is only one of three enormously different projects that the London-born actor has out this summer. In the just-released blockbuster Now You See Me 2, he plays a mysterious tech genius (“I’ve joined the great tradition of British movie antagonists,” he says with a delighted laugh), and on June 24, he costars with Paul Dano in the Sundance cause célèbre Swiss Army Man, a startlingly strange two-hander in which he plays (no kidding) a dead body.
The one thing that Daniel Radcliffe knows about Harry Potter that no one else does:
Indeed, at age 26, six years after shooting the final two Potter films, Radcliffe hasn’t merely moved on from one of the iconic roles of the last half century. He’s taken his talent in unexpectedly bold new directions. “It’s a bit like Radiohead,” he says. “Their first few albums were wildly successful, so they chose to go, ‘We can do what we like now. We can be weird and experimental.’ I was in a similar situation. The pressure of commercial success was lifted at a very, very young age—I’ll never have that level of box-office success again. So I don’t have to think, What’s the most successful thing that I can do? I’m free to push myself.”
If you talk to those who’ve worked with him—from director Alfonso Cuarón (who directed Harry Potter and the Prisoner of Azkaban) to beleaguered publicists who’ve shepherded Radcliffe on arduous PR tours—they’ll tell you the actor displays none of the vainglorious entitlement or psychological damage that usually comes with being a child star. He’s a warm, generous, upbeat soul who enjoys watching ice hockey with his girlfriend—actress Erin Darke, whom he met while making Kill Your Darlings—and takes pride in playing down his specialness.
His enthusiastic modesty comes across from the moment we meet at the Four Seasons in Beverly Hills, the movie world’s equivalent of Rick’s Café in Casablanca—everyone eventually winds up here. In his gray T-shirt and black trousers, Radcliffe is a slim, fit five-feet-five, with the ropy-veined arms of one who’s been in Colombia shooting a movie, Jungle, about an ordinary guy who gets separated from his friends and struggles to survive in the wildest of wilds. Perhaps because his clean-shaven self is so well known, he sports the kind of beard you might expect Harry Potter to adopt after he’s vanquished Voldemort and retired to Brooklyn to roast small batches of carefully curated single-origin coffee beans.
Radcliffe, who divides his time between London and New York, hopes his career will one day resemble that of Michael Caine, with whom he worked on Now You See Me 2 and whose enduring joie de vivre and professionalism he adored: “I want to be like that when I’m in my 80s!” One big part of being like that is loving to work, and since hanging up his wand, Radcliffe has startled many not just by starring in movie after movie—later this year, in Imperium, he plays a real-life FBI agent who infiltrated a white-supremacist terror group—but by showing a serious commitment to live theater.
The electrifying liveness of live theater is key to the collaborations between Graham and Rourke, who were nominated for a BAFTA for their television play, The Vote, about a fictional polling place during the final 90 minutes of the May 7, 2015, British election—a show broadcast exactly during the last 90 minutes of that real-life election. This team loves the high-wire excitement of mingling imaginary stories and bulletins from the front lines of Now.
That’s precisely what you get in Privacy, which is less a dramatic story than a witty theatrical collage famous for folding the audience into the play itself through the use of their smartphones. In the London version of Privacy, for instance, audience members were encouraged to take selfies and email them to the production staff, who then projected the images on a screen behind the performers during the action. Such crowd-sourcing moments are interwoven with what you might call “documentary theater.” A small group of actors (the New York cast includes Rachel Dratch, Michael Countryman, and De’Adre Aziza) plays nearly 40 real-life psychologists, politicians, technologists, and ordinary people, all of whom Graham and Rourke interviewed for the play and whose words are quoted verbatim.
The one trying to make sense of all this is Radcliffe’s character, who is based on Graham himself. Reeling from a painful breakup, the Writer (as he’s known) follows his ex from England to New York and tries to make himself more open and sharing—only to bump against the realities of what openness means in these days of social media, CCTV surveillance, and corporations that turn our private photos into advertising messages.
“This isn’t a tract,” says Rourke. “What Privacy doesn’t do is tell you to throw your phone away or go into a bunker. But there are revelations that are scary. The play may make you think about privacy legislation or whether you should ever put a single meal you eat on your Instagram.” She laughs. “When did we all start photographing our food?”
Because Privacy is exploratory—it’s about questions, not answers—you need a likable and compelling figure to keep the action from floating into the ether of abstraction. This is where Radcliffe comes in.
“The Writer character,” Rourke tells me, “is intended to be an Everyman. Daniel is someone people readily identify with; he can make the audience relax and watch him. But what makes him perfect for us is that he has genuine intellectual curiosity, is interested in new ideas, and he’s really brave—he’s got the spirit to take on a big challenge.”
This is undeniable. Radcliffe, who was raised going to the theater with his parents, didn’t simply decide to do stage work. He threw himself into roles in which it would be easy to belly flop. He was full-frontally nude in Equus, sang on Broadway in How to Succeed in Business Without Really Trying, and starred as the orphaned title character in Martin McDonagh’s dark tragicomedy The Cripple of Inishmaan.
Radcliffe brings that same gung-ho spirit to his movies—and he’s never done anything wilder than Swiss Army Man, a boundaries-pushing movie that casts him as a preposterously flatulent dead body that somehow begins speaking and helps a suicidal castaway (Dano) find a reason to go on.
“I don’t sit at home asking, ‘What’s the weirdest thing I can do next?’ ” Radcliffe says with a grin. “But it’s a film, so you can do something extraordinary and strange.”
“One of my favorite things about Dan,” says Dano, who spent three weeks toting around his costar’s supposedly lifeless body, “is that he’s so game. He’s that way in friendship, too. We went out for dinner and karaoke, and he really went for it. People were taking his photo because they knew him, but Dan didn’t let that bother him. He just did it.”
I ask Radcliffe if the theme of his new play holds any special resonance for someone so famous that strangers feel free to photograph him without asking. Does he ever feel that his own privacy is being invaded?
“The only time is when the newspapers write something about my girlfriend or my parents. But the thing is, in my job, you’re being more and more encouraged to give away your privacy. The studio says, ‘Can you get Twitter, please? Can you get Facebook?’ And I’m ‘No, I don’t do that.’ It’s not for any moral reason. I don’t think it’s wrong for anyone else to do it. But for me, it would be the worst thing in the world to suddenly have a new thing to be obsessed with, to have a constant feed of what people are thinking about me.
“One day I’m going to have kids, and some paparazzo is going to take a photo of them, and I’m going to try and stop them, and there will be some huge debate about it. If somebody says, ‘Well, you’ve had Twitter for years,’ it’s hard to say you want your privacy when you’ve been making every moment of your day public.”
Such debates are one reason he thinks Privacy is important. “We don’t think we’re going to change people’s worlds or we’re going to change the way people use technology,” he says. “Nothing is going to do that in one hit. But this is a time when we should be having conversations about all this, and if Privacy helps start those conversations, we will have achieved what we want to achieve.”
It so happens that on the morning Radcliffe and I meet, seemingly every inch of display space in L.A. features a poster for the new Wizarding World of Harry Potter attraction at Universal Studios. Talk about sharing yourself with the public. Radcliffe’s bespectacled face is on all of them, as he hasn’t failed to notice.
“It’s a funny thing,” he tells me. “We were driving around the other day, and I turned to my girlfriend and said, ‘It’s weird to think that there are going to be pictures of the eighteen- or nineteen-year-old me forever.’ And if it’s weird now, God knows what it’ll be like in 20 years. Seeing those posters, I found myself thinking, Oh, that’s what I looked like then.” He shakes his head. “I’m a completely different person now.”
Hair: David Babaii; Grooming: Debra Ferullo
Fashion Editor: Lawren Howell
Photographed at Apex Photo Studios, L.A.; Produced by Tallulah Bernard at Rosco Production
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