Even while still wrapped up in Potter, Radcliffe understood it was important to put distance between himself and Hogwarts. “The best business decision I ever made is suddenly realising what freedom you have because you’ve been given it by this incredible first job,” he told Business Insider earlier this year. “I’ve heard from multiple directors since then that even if they didn’t get to see me in Equus, hearing that I had done it made people go, ‘OK, so he wants to be in this more than just a minute.’”
What’s especially impressive is that he was making these mature decisions about his career while struggling in private with his Potter fame. Being in the public eye seemed to come more naturally to his co-star Emma Watson, who, in the immediate years after the franchise ended, became one of Hollywood’s most in-demand young stars, with leading roles in Beauty and the Beast and Little Women (these days, she prefers activism to acting).
Describing himself as often “dead behind the eyes” at the peak of Potter-mania, Radcliffe tried to medicate the pressure away with binge drinking. He has recalled turning up to the Harry Potter set heavily hungover. On his days off, he would drink himself into a black-out stupor. In 2012, he became involved in a drunken brawl in New York – before going sober for good 12 months later.
Equus gave him the freedom denied to many child stars and he has since made the most of it. He was thoroughly unsettling in Horns (2013), a horror film in which he portrayed a man who wakes to find two bony protrusions emerging from his skull, and leapt at the chance to play a flatulent corpse in 2016’s dark comedy Swiss Army Man. Then came the chef’s kiss of his absurdist phase – the 2019 action comedy Guns Akimbo, in which he plays a video game nerd with guns surgically attached to his hands who is forced to star in a brutal reality show.