Daniel Radcliffe: 'Harry Potter' star to return to London stage
British actor Daniel Radcliffe poses for photographs following an interview to discuss ... more>
LONDON (AP) The time is coming maybe sooner than you expect when you look at Daniel Radcliffe and dont think Harry Potter.
The 23-year-old actor has gone from boy wizard to Broadway hoofer to Beat poet Allen Ginsberg, whom he plays in new film Kill Your Darlings. He has several wildly different films lined up and is soon to take to the London stage as star of Martin McDonaghs barbed comedy The Cripple of Inishmaan.
The play gives audiences the chance to see Mr. Radcliffe in yet another new light, as Billy, a disabled orphan in 1930s Ireland who ha! rbors an unlikely dream of Hollywood stardom.
Cripple, which opens in June for a 12-week run, is part of a West End season of plays overseen by director Michael Grandage, who has assembled an A-list company of actors that includes Mr. Radcliffe, Ben Whishaw, Judi Dench and Jude Law.
First staged in 1996, the play is a typically potent mix of comedy and cruelty from the writer-director of the violent, witty movies In Bruges and Seven Psychopaths.
He walks that line between tragedy and comedy so brilliantly, Mr. Radcliffe said of Mr. McDonagh.
I think one of the hilarious things about this play is, by our standards today, how politically incorrect it is, said the actor, looking lean if a tad tired hes been at the gym, working out ahead of rehearsals for the play in the troupes office atop a West End playhouse. So much of the comedy is just people being relentlessly cruel to Billy.
Im trying to write something at the moment, and its just so dark, and I think! its funn! y, but Im not sure if anybody else ever would. I aspire to be a poor mans Martin McDonagh.
It shouldnt come as a surprise that the one-time boy wizard is a fan of the edgier end of comedy and that hes working on a screenplay. His entire post-Potter career feels designed to wrong-foot anyone seeking to pigeonhole him.
The play is Mr. Radcliffes first time on the West End stage since his 2007 run in Equus, Peter Shaffers play about a troubled stable boy who blinds horses. It featured the then-teenage actor in a nude scene, which triggered a deluge of Harry Potters Wand headlines. But critics praised the young actors brave and committed performance.
Mr. Radcliffe said Equus was a signal of intent as to what I wanted to do.
I didnt just want to take an easy way out of this. I wanted to really try and take risks and make a career for myself.
Since then, hes mixed movies and theater work, including a 2011 Broadway run as a scheming businessman in How to Succeed in Business Without Really Trying.
Hes shot three films due to come out in the next year. Kill Your Darlings, which premiered at the Sundance Film Festival in January, stars Mr. Radcliffe as Ginsberg Beat poetry, gay sex scenes and all. Mr. Radcliffe says hes never been prouder of a piece of work.
Hes also filmed The F Word, which he calls a very funny, very sweet but also very smart romantic comedy from Canadian director Michael Dowse.
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