Daniel Radcliffe Was Scared to Learn Harry Potter's Finale, Begged Friends to Keep Him in the Dark
The Harry Potter actor couldn’t get his hands on the final book in time and had to beg everyone around him to save him from spoilers… Which was quite a tough feat.
By the time Daniel Radcliffe was cast to play the Boy Who Lived, J.K. Rowling had already released four books. As Dan and his friends were shooting the movie, they were obviously getting more and more invested in the story of their characters, so they were waiting eagerly for the new entries to learn their own fates, in a way.
The final book, Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows, came out almost as a birthday present to Daniel: the release happened two days before the actor’s birthday. While he was excited to read it, he also… Couldn’t. There were already plans in place, and the young actor had to wait for a couple of days until he could get his hands on the book.
For Dan, these were a few very stressful days: literally everyone around him was already reading and discussing the finale of Harry Potter’s adventures, and he, the one and only Harry Potter actor, could join them! Worse yet, Radcliffe was terrified that someone might accidentally spoil the last book for him, and he tried to avoid that.
“[The book] came out two days before my 18th birthday, and I was going to a match for my birthday. So I was going around for two days without having read it where everybody else was reading it. And so it was a two-day-long struggle to beg not to get told the ending. And I did actually manage to do that,” shared the actor.
Despite the stress, Radcliffe somehow pulled this off and stayed clear of all spoilers until he got his hands on the book — and the young actor didn’t regret having to wait.
“I remember finishing it on the plane and just becoming very emotional. I found it’s a very moving book. The epilogue was something that I liked. I know not everybody did at all, but it was actually something I didn’t have a problem with. And it’s tying together all those loose ends,” revealed Daniel.
We’re well-familiar with the absolute pain of having your favorite story spoiled for you but we can’t even imagine what Dan had to go through knowing that the majority of people around him already knew the end to his story and he was the only one who didn’t. If we had to guess, that must have been Daniel’s most stressful birthday ever!
Source: Collider