Radcliffe returns to stage

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 Radcliffe in yet another new light, as Billy, a disabled orphan in 1930s Ireland who harbors 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 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, Radcliffe said of 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 funny, 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 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.

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 Radcliffe as Ginsberg Beat poetry, gay sex scenes and all. 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.

I dont want to say (Im) playing myself, exactly, Radcliffe said, but (Im) playing a character thats fairly high-anxiety, slightly hyperactive guy.

Hes especially excited about Horns, a film by French horror auteur Alexandre Aja (The Hills Have Eyes, Piranha) about a bereaved man who grows devilish horns that allow him access to the thoughts and feelings of others.

Its a love story, its a revenge movie, its a horror movie in parts its going to be crazy, said Radcliffe, who made an earlier foray into horror movies with The Woman in Black.

Next up, he will star as mad-scientists assistant Igor in Max Landis pop-culture spin on the Frankenstein story.

All in all, its an eclectic list of projects. Radcliffe says there is a philosophy guiding his career choices, but its very basic. Its just what excites me. Its what gets me interested.

Hopefully later on this year people will start to see some very different performances from me. And hopefully some really good movies, he said. Its about the movie as a whole, ! not just ! people studying my performance and seeing how Im getting different and how Im growing up.

Radcliffe accepts that fascination with how hes growing up is unlikely to fade altogether. But he seems comfortable with the Harry Potter legacy, happy to have made the often tricky transition from child star to adult actor.

The Harry Potter moviemakers have been praised for creating a stable creative home for their young stars, who went from preteens to adults over the course of eight films released between 2001 and 2011.

I feel like everyone wanted Potter to be more of a handcuff than it actually was, said the resolutely well-adjusted Radcliffe.

I think Harry Potter is going to be around for a while a long while but as long as it doesnt inhibit me getting parts in the present time, then its fine. Its a lovely association to have, because its something Im incredibly proud of.

People always say, Dont you just want to forget about it? No! That was my entire adolescence.