Daniel Radcliffe sometimes forgets he was Harry Potter

In a thorough interview, Daniel Radcliffe discusses the challenges of being an actor post-Potter, balancing his work with his personal life, and much more.

Believe it or not, it’s been four years since Daniel Radcliffe last appeared as Harry Potter in Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows: Part 2. Since then, the actor has taken pains to make sure he doesn’t get pigeon-holed by the role that made him famous. He’s taken parts in independent movies like Kill Your Darlings, where he played a young Allen Ginsberg, and Horns, about a young man with a demonic set of horns. Neither movie much resembled the Harry Potter films.

But when a movie series has the cultural penetration of Harry Potter, comparisons are bound to crop up. Pundits watched Radcliffe’s newer work and managed to find connections back to his time as the Boy Who Lived, although the actor didn’t see them at the time, according to an in-depth interview over at Buzzfeed.

"When I did Kill Your Darlings, the first scene in that film was me sweeping the floor, and I never fucking thought anything of that until somebody in an interview was like, “So, first scene, you’ve got glasses on and you have a broomstick.” I went, “Ugh.”And then in Horns, you know, my character wore Gryffindor colors. I was like, I should have thought of that said, “Don’t do that!” But I don’t think about things like that."

Note that Radcliffe isn’t ragging on the Harry Potter series here—it’s just that he was making movies like Horns at a time when he trying to prove that he could do things apart from the mega-franchise, so the comparisons could be frustrating.

According to Radcliffe, “those films did what I needed [them] to do. I was good in them, and they showed different sides of me.” Having proven himself in independent features, he appears to be more willing to take on big-budget studio fare—he’s currently starring alongside James McAvoy in Victor Frankenstein, and will have a role in Now You See Me: The Second Act next year.*

Does that mean that he may attach himself to another Harry Potter-level franchise? Radcliffe is keeping a level head about it.

"[N]othing’s going to match that. Like, Star Wars is going to match that, but nothing I’ll probably do in the rest of my career is going to come close financially to that mark. So in a way, that’s an incredible release of pressure. Because a lot of my friends are looking for that franchise, looking for that role. And I’m like, well, I don’t have to do that."

For the record, Victor Frankenstein is taking a beating in the press, but it’s worth noting that critics aren’t faulting Radcliffe for failing to bring back the Harry Potter magic. They’re just treating it as a bad movie in which Radcliffe happens to have a role. In other words, they’re treating him as an ordinary actor, so it seems his attempts to stand on his own talent have worked.

Next: Casting spoilers for Harry Potter and the Cursed Child

*The Now You See Me sequel is another movie with an obvious Harry Potter connection—the presence of magic—that Radcliffe didn’t see until later. He doesn’t look at his projects in those terms anymore.