Daniel Radcliffe Has Found His Freedom

Ten minutes before the start of Daniel Radcliffe’s one-man show on Broadway, Every Brilliant Thing, the actor is crouched in the aisle. He presses a card into the hand of a woman sitting six rows from the stage and instructs her to shout the line written on it when he cues her. He gently touches her arm to reassure her, and she flushes. As the former Harry Potter star walks away, another audience member—a stranger—leans across the aisle. “Are you OK?” she asks before brandishing her phone. “I got a picture, don’t worry!”

Every Brilliant Thing is an intimate and surprisingly buoyant play about someone who copes with their mother’s suicide attempts by cataloging every “brilliant” thing that makes life worth living. Since the show, by Duncan Macmillan and Jonny Donahoe, broke out at the Edinburgh Festival Fringe in 2014, it has played in 66 countries, starring actors from Minnie Driver to Phoebe Waller-Bridge. But on this afternoon in late February, attendees have trudged through the gray Manhattan slush to see—and, perhaps, be conscripted by—the boy who lived. Just a few days into previews, TikTok and Instagram are rife with videos of the star palling around with fans in the theater.

Radcliffe anticipated this. When he recruits a woman in my aisle to play a more substantial role, he confides in her that the people who seem too eager to leap onstage with him “scare me.” This from a man who once drew thousands of fans to Trafalgar Square to catch a glimpse of the teenage wizard at a film premiere. He is a touchstone of millennial childhood, and despite his best efforts to shed himself of Harry Potter—his first onstage role, in Equus in 2007, required nudity, effectively announcing his graduation from child actor—he can never quite escape its unyielding grip on the culture. Another audience member he pulled onstage, Radcliffe tells me the next day, turned out to be the father of a cast member of Harry Potter and the Cursed Child, playing a block away. And reporters writing about the show have bombarded him with questions about the forthcoming HBO TV adaptation of the books.

“It was going to create an intensity and weirdness around some interactions that might not have been there in other versions of the play,” he says, of his particular brand of fame, the next morning over Zoom. “But I think some people might be more willing to jump in because they feel like they’ve grown up with me.” The play allows Radcliffe, a deeply private celebrity, to bond with fans on his own terms. “There is something lovely about it that I don’t get when I’m walking down the street with my cap on,” he says, lowering his eyes to demonstrate how he goes incognito in New York. “I’m able to be free and easy with people.” 

And he’s having a blast doing it. Radcliffe’s post-Potter career has been defined by risky, quirky, and largely comedic roles—a flatulent corpse in the Daniels’ Swiss Army Man; Weird Al in a parodic music biopic; a quick-tongued composer in Merrily We Roll Along, which won him a Tony in 2024. Now, alongside Every Brilliant Thing, he is starring in a new comedy on NBC from the 30 Rock brain trust, The Fall and Rise of Reggie Dinkins, playing the straight man opposite the anarchic comedian Tracy Morgan. Frankly, Radcliffe doesn’t need to work for money. He’s solely picking projects for fun: “There is a freedom and looseness in everything I’m choosing right now.”

Another driving factor of Radcliffe’s career: his almost-3-year-old son. After Merrily ended its Broadway run, Radcliffe, 36, thought he would take a break from the daily grind of theater. “Then I had a conversation with an older actor about how hard it is to do theater once your kids are in real school because they’re gone all day, and that’s when you’re around. And then they come home at night, and that’s when you’re not there,” he recalls. Reggie Dinkins, meanwhile, conveniently shot 40 minutes from his home. “I assume there is going to be a point when he’s a teenager when he’s like, ‘I really don’t want to hang out with you, Dad,’ and I’ll go off to shoots. But right now he’s pretty into hanging out with me.”

When Radcliffe comes home each night from his 85-minute show, he unpacks the performance with his longtime girlfriend—how it went comedically, but also emotionally. Because attendees take part, each production requires some improv from Radcliffe. At one point, he asks audience members for two books to act as key props in a romantic subplot of the show. At the matinee I attended, an audience member gleefully handed him a book titled Men Who Hate Women: From Incels to Pickup Artists. Radcliffe made a show of faux exasperation at having to read it to his love interest (also played by an audience member), stage-whispering with barely contained delight, “I’m never speaking to you again.”

But for all its laugh lines, the play wrestles with heavy mental-health themes. Radcliffe’s character began writing his uplifting list when he was 7 because his parents would not discuss his mother’s hospitalization with him. It was his way of persuading her to stay. “There’s something so beautiful and heartbreaking about any child having those instincts,” he says. It has forced Radcliffe to reckon with his own son’s growth and inevitable confrontation with conflict and tragedy. “My son is, generally speaking, incredibly joyful and wonderful and lovely. And the knowledge that life is going to come for him—I truly am not going to cope,” he says. “I know now I’m not going to do well with it.” 

Reggie Dinkins shares an earnestness with Every Brilliant Thing. It is a softer-hearted show than 30 Rock. Radcliffe plays Arthur, a documentary filmmaker hired by Morgan’s disgraced former football player, Reggie, to make a The Last Dance–style documentary and facilitate Reggie’s comeback. Of the show’s comparatively less abrasive characters, he says, “There’s enough crazy narcissists in the world right now that we don’t need to see more of them.”

Arthur, too, needs some career rehab. After winning an Oscar, he bungles a Marvel movie; a video of him losing his cool over directing actors opposite tennis balls in front of a green screen goes viral. In typical 30 Rock fashion, the bit reaches the height of absurdity when someone informs Arthur that some of the tennis balls are meant to be actual tennis balls in the scene. 

The meta joke is that Radcliffe was a pioneer of acting opposite tennis balls. “I don’t have a problem with it. I’m sure I will act with tennis balls again. I’ve done some of the best acting of my career across from tennis balls,” he says, laughing. “On those first few Potter films, Maggie Smith and Alan Rickman were probably going, ‘This is ridiculous.’ But the kids, we were like, ‘OK, fine.’”

As a teen, after a long day of filming one of the franchise’s eight films, Radcliffe would go back to his trailer and binge comedies—anything with Alan Partridge, The Office, and, of course, 30 Rock. “If you’d told me when I was finishing those films that I would end up working with Robert Carlock and Sam Means, being produced by Tina [Fey], and standing across from Tracy, I would have bitten your hand off to take that offer.”

Radcliffe may have been a comedy nerd, but it wasn’t obvious he’d excel at it. “I was so self-conscious as a teenager, particularly about my face. By the end of Potter, I’d gone, ‘I sort of hate my face when it does anything expressive, so if I don’t do anything with it, then nothing can go wrong,’” he says. “You can see, particularly in the sixth film, I’m very, very stiff.”

Then, just before the release of the final Potter movie, he was offered the lead in a revival of How to Succeed in Business Without Really Trying on Broadway, his second major stage role following Equus but his first truly comedic one. It gave him the opportunity to perform jokes in front of a live audience and observe in real time how people responded. “I learned my face being weird is sometimes helpful, actually, and not to be shied away from. It’s part of your tool kit as an actor. When you’re younger, you’re worried about looking cool. As you get older, you realize those things are meaningless and subjective anyway.”

And he began to home in on the particular type of comedy at which he would later thrive—such as keeping a straight face when Tracy Morgan starts yelling about a raccoon that has crawled out of his toilet. “In a way, it’s very easy to play the straight man,” he says, “because you’re just playing the reality of the situation. I think I am generally funniest when whoever I’m playing is unaware that anything funny is happening.”

Next, he will attempt to transition from playing director to becoming one. He’s written a script he hopes to film. Established as he may be as a performer, “Nobody is going to just hand me an amazing script,” he says. “I need to prove myself.” Much of Radcliffe’s life has been defined by his fame—donning a mask to take the subway unbothered or trying to counter preconceived notions of who and what he could play. With Every Brilliant Thing, he is collapsing the gulf between himself and his audience. He is embracing them not as the fans who enabled him never to have to work again, but as collaborators in the next chapter of his story. He will always need them, though perhaps never as much as he does to make it to the final curtain of this show.