Daniel Radcliffe on Investments, New Projects, and “Star Wars”

Daniel Radcliffe is well known for choosing smaller independent films after the commercial success of the Harry Potter franchise. His past works include Horns and Swiss Army Man, which both showed his prowess as an actor, and most recently, Jungle, a biographical adventure drama film set to premiere this month. Daniel plays Yossi Ghinsberg, an Israeli tourist who gets lost in the jungles of Bolivia and winds up fighting for his life with no chance of help or rescue. Daniel recently told Forbes magazine that his work as an actor parallels Ghinsberg’s search for all things extraordinary:

My whole thing is that I’m in a position where I don’t have to do things unless I want to do them, and there are not many actors that are in that situation. I have the chance to just go after stuff that I love that is sometimes weird and different and stuff that I’m really passionate about, and that is a very rare position to be in as an actor.

Daniel says he dealt with quite a bit of internal turmoil after the end of the Harry Potter movies, but instead of letting himself get into a slump, he invested in his acting career by learning new skills and finding new projects:

I think I’m becoming more active in my career and in seeking out projects, and then once I’ve found those projects actually becoming involved in the development of them and just keeping an eye on it, keeping them pushing forward. When I was first out of Potter or for a few years afterwards, I think I was kind of reluctant to, and I thought my self as just an actor and didn’t want to deal with the other part of it. You can do it that way, but after a few years of that and there’s a film you really want to happen, and then it doesn’t happen because it falls apart for whatever reason, and that has happened in the indie world a couple of times with me, if you can have a little bit of control over a project you start to take more interest, and that’s what I found myself doing.

He went on to talk about which of his films is the most underrated (Horns) and his interest in directing a film of his own one day. The interview ended with him joking about how, to our dismay, he won’t be appearing in any Star Wars movies anytime soon:

I would be surprised if they would want that to happen. Most of the time, if a director says, ‘Oh, I don’t want him in this because he played Harry Potter,’ I don’t think that’s a good reason not to cast me in something, but when the thing you are essentially casting somebody in is another massive franchise, I think to have somebody that is very recognized from another franchise might be weird and distracting like we were doing some weird Harry Potter and Star Wars crossover movie.

Well, to each their own, but we definitely want to see a Harry Potter and Star Wars crossover movie! While you wait for that fateful day, make sure to check out Jungle when it’s released in select theaters and online on October 20!