The Only Harry Potter Movie Daniel Radcliffe Finds "Hard to Watch'

Summary

• Daniel Radcliffe is now taking on the strangest and most creative roles, effectively avoiding the Harry Potter tie-in.
• However, the actor still loves the franchise and appreciates the experience and acting skills he's gained over the years.
• Still, of the eight films he's starred in, there's one he absolutely despises.

Regardless of the author's controversies, the Wizarding World of Harry Potter will never stop delighting young and old with its ethereal atmosphere. This adoration for the franchise is not only true for the millennials who were exposed to the books and movies in the '90s and '00s, but also for younger generations, as today's kids grow up reading J. K. Rowling's books and enjoying the movies with Daniel Radcliffe.

Incidentally, Radcliffe himself, though publicly opposed to Rowling's transphobic views, remains incredibly loyal to the franchise that launched him into an acting career. During and after Harry Potter, however, Daniel Radcliffe has gone to great lengths to avoid being forever known as the shy, bespectacled wizard, venturing into West End and Broadway productions as well as indie film and television projects. He has managed to avoid getting stuck playing the same role in different projects by consistently demonstrating his acting chops.

By the time the final Harry Potter installments were filmed, the young Radcliffe had come to see his work not just as a job, but as an art form, and was extremely critical of his performances. So while he was aware that his skills were improving with each movie, there was still one film in the franchise that he found completely unbearable because of his own acting.

Radcliffe Was Critical of His Own Acting in This Harry Potter Movie

In 2015, during Radcliffe's interview for Playboy, the conversation turned to his acting skills. It was revealed that the actor considers his performance in the fifth film, Order of the Phoenix, to be the peak, while the worst performance, in his opinion, was in the next installment, Half-Blood Prince.

'In every movie up to the sixth one, you can see a big step forward in my acting. And then it stopped, or went backward maybe, in the sixth film. I really enjoyed my performance in the fifth—part of it was how much I worked with people like Gary Oldman and David Thewlis.'

In the sixth film, Radcliffe, who was already 18 years old at the time of filming, decided to re-examine Harry's condition and tried to depict the effects on the character's mental state after all the gruesome events. Unfortunately, the attempt was a failure, and Harry felt completely numb and blank, which was painful for the actor himself, who couldn't stomach his own performance in the film.

'On the sixth, I remember watching it and thinking, "Wow, there's been no growth." You're watching a mistake you made every day for 11 months—that's the way I saw it. I had the idea that Harry was like a soldier traumatized by war, and as a result of that, he shuts down emotionally. That's not a bad idea, but it’s not the most interesting thing to watch for two and a half hours.'

Obviously, this had a big impact on Radcliffe's perception of his own career. In addition to the fact that the next two installments, Deathly Hallows — Part 1 and 2, already featured a truly impressive dramatic performance from the actor, his career path turned first to the stage and then to independent and experimental cinema.

Since then, Daniel Radcliffe is no longer associated with the typecast of a shy and not particularly emotionally expressive boy. He is now a madman, a maverick of the acting world, whose acting ranges from an incredibly memorable portrayal of a corpse to a truly outstanding performance as Al Yankovic.

Source: Playboy.