Daniel Radcliffe Fought Harry Potter Director Over Lucius Malfoy's Posh Accent
While Harry Potter was fighting Lord Voldemort to defend his country, Daniel Radcliffe was fighting his director to defend his colleague's peculiar accent.
Daniel Radcliffe pretty much grew up on the set of Harry Potter, and like most other kids there, he had a great relationship with his older colleagues.
Many of them were seasoned actors and actresses, and while learning about their craft and lives, young Dan also made sure to help them in any way he could even when he was a child.
After Jason Isaacs bagged the role of Lucius Malfoy, he took this opportunity very seriously.
Jason wanted to dive deeper into the character and develop his own vision of Malfoy, finding a way to represent everything he stands for with subtle details.
One of Isaacs' ideas was figuring out the perfect accent to compliment Lucius Malfoy.
"There's a particular art critic in England who has a voice like fingernails on a blackboard. I combined him with a teacher I thought was patronizing and sadistic when I was in drama school. <...>
I just wanted to find a voice that made him drip with the millennia that his family had been in power — complete disdain and contempt for anybody and everything else," Jason Isaacs shared.
Despite Jason having done a great job at finding the perfect manner of articulation for his character, the director, Chris Columbus, didn't like what he heard.
He didn't share Jason Isaacs' vision for Malfoy Sr. and wanted the actor to get rid of the accent he'd worked so hard on developing in the first place.
That's when young Daniel Radcliffe came into play.
Seeing that Isaacs was upset with the director's response, 12-year-old Dan stepped in to defend his elder colleague.
He told Jason that he found his unique accent "really cool" and decided to back him up on the idea of using it in the movie. Dan wanted to convince Chris Columbus to adapt the actor's idea no matter what.
As you might have guessed, the young actor succeeded: the peculiar articulation you can hear from Lucius Malfoy in the Harry Potter movies is the very same accent Jason Isaacs came up with!
It definitely adds flair to Malfoy Sr., but without young Daniel's intervention, Lucius Malfoy would've been just speaking normally. How boring.
Source: Cheatsheet