Harry Potter is the role that refuses to die for Daniel Radcliffe.
Though it has now been two years since the final Harry Potter movie was released, the actor who played its title character has found difficulty trying to separate himself from the franchise. He’s tried taking on new adult roles and more ambitious projects, bit it’s been to no avail.
This week at the Venice Film Festival throngs of Harry Potter fans showed up to the premiere of Kill Your Darlings , the new independent project for Daniel Radcliffe that has him playing beat poet Allen Ginsberg. The young fans banged on walls and rattled windows at the theater, hoping to catch a glimpse of Radcliffe.
“I’ve been dealing with it in various ways since I was 11,” Radcliffe said, via MTV . “I’m incredibly grateful for the swirl of support behind me. My fans seem excited by the unconventional path I am taking.”
But not everyone is ready to let go of Harry Potter, even in Hollywood. Evan Goldberg and Seth Rogan, who co-wrote the surprise summer hit This Is The End , said they originally wanted Radcliffe in their movie, which shows a group of their Hollywood friends as themselves.
Radcliffe turned down the role , which Goldberg admitted may have had a few too many Harry Potter jokes in it.
“Two years before we brought it to anybody else, we brought it to Daniel Radcliffe and he rejected it because it was sh—y, it wasn’t good enough,” Goldberg told BuzzFeed. “We got too excited, we jumped the gun on that. If we waited another year, I bet he would have done it.”
Despite the attachment to his childhood role, Radcliffe said he wants to cut a new image in Hollywood, and wouldn’t mind playing a villain .
“I am never going to be cast to play a Bruce Willis character in Die Hard,” Daniel Radcliffe recently told The Sun . He added, “I would make a much better villain than Bond — I am not nearly strapping enough to play Bond.”
But it seems no matter what he does, Daniel Radcliffe will have a hard time shaking the Harry Potter role.