Daniel Radcliffe’s 8 Finest Post-Potter Roles

The former boy-wizard is turning into a very busy man.

8. J Pierrepont Finch (How To Succeed In Business Without Really Trying).

REX USA/Greg Allen

Coming out of a blockbuster franchise like Potter, you can’t go much further out of your comfort zone than taking to the Broadway stage for the 50th anniversary revival of a beloved musical. He did ten months as the young hustling window cleaner who climbs the greasy pole. Everyone agreed he was a trouper, but nobody pretended he could actually really sing.

7. Arthur Kipps (The Woman In Black).

REX USA/Moviestore / Rex

His first big movie outside Potter made waves, maybe not as much from the serviceable job he did in it but because it was the first great British ghost story of a movie. He was probably too young for the role of widowed lawyer Kipps, but he held his own.

6. Drunk guy in music video (“Beginners” by Slow Club).

Moshi Moshi

He basically staggers about a pub doing some drunk acting and looking maudlin while mouthing along to this track from the folkish Sheffield duo. But the song is excellent and it was filmed at Finsbury Park’s Faltering Fullback, aka one the best pubs in London.

5. Wallace (The F Word).

Entertainment One

Playing against type as oddballs and misfits in kooky things is all very well, but Radcliffe’s first foray into romantic comedy could be a more tricky proposition. Due out next year, he plays Wallace, a young man who develops feelings for woman involved with someone else, and finds himself in the dreaded “friend zone”. One of the buzziest offerings at the Toronto Film Festival, this sounds like a gawky indie spin on the genre in the vein of (500) Days Of Summer.

4. Billy Claren (The Cripple Of Inishmaan).

REX USA/Can Nguyen / Rex

Radcliffe properly found what is looking like becoming his niche for black comedy in the London revival of Martin McDonough’s comic masterpiece. In a remote Irish island in 1934, crippled young orphan Billy finds out that a Hollywood movie is being filmed on the neighbouring island of Inishmore, and sees a chance for his way out.

3. Allen Ginsberg (Kill Your Darlings).

The Works

Playing gay is one of the big rites of passage, or at least a box to be ticked, for an actor on an edgy mission to show range and versatility. As is playing a beloved figure from the popular zeitgeist. This year Radcliffe did both in this bio-drama about murder in the beat generation. And his intense but studied performance pretty much nailed it.

2. Dr Vladimir Borngard (A Young Doctor’s Notebook).


Sky Arts’ sort-of sitcom based on the bleak works of Russian writer Mikhail Bulgahov is one of the single strangest television programmes of the past two years. In revolutionary Russia and amid the gore of a Russian hospital, Radcliffe plays the young Doctor descending into a hell of morphine addiction and moral degridation. He gets visited by his older self played by Jon Hamm and at one point they share a bath. You have to see it really.

1. Ig Perrish (Horns).

The forthcoming fantasy thriller from director Alexandre Aja could just turn out to be his defining role post-Hogwarts. Radcliffe plays a man who, after mysterious drunken night, wakes up with two protusions coming from his forehead which allow him to compel people reveal their deepest secrets. Accused of the rape and murder of his girlfriend, he uses his powers to hunt down the real killer. An altogether blacker kind of magic then.

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