5 Great Daniel Radcliffe Performances Outside of Harry Potter, & #1 Is A Weirdly Beautiful Movie About A Farting Corpse
Despite controversy involving the original author, the Harry Potter franchise remains one of the most profitable brands ever. The movies alone have grossed more than $7.7 billion worldwide, which is only a fraction of what Warner Bros. Discovery makes with toys, clothes, theme parks, special food, and everything else that followed the adaptations. Then there’s the books, plays, special events, and everything you can imagine, just like magic. Now, the franchise will grow even more as HBO prepares a TV adaptation with a whole new cast. Of course, Harry Potter was responsible for launching dozens of careers, among them the titular hero’s first actor, Daniel Radcliffe.
Despite being permanently associated with Harry Potter, Radcliffe has spent the years since the franchise ended building an impressive résumé. Since movies don’t seem to be an issue, Radcliffe has also frequently chosen smaller roles that help him stretch different acting muscles, instead of quickly joining another blockbuster franchise. That’s why the actor has embraced stage work, in addition to niche and genre projects. Some movies in particular help showcase Radcliffe’s range, even though some have bizarre premises.
5) Horns
Alexandre Aja’s Horns casts Radcliffe as Ig Perrish, a small-town resident who wakes up one morning growing horns from his skull just as the entire community accuses him of the rape and murder of his girlfriend, Merrin Williams (Juno Temple). Adapted from Joe Hill’s novel by screenwriter Keith Bunin, the story gives Ig’s horns the power to make everyone around him confess their darkest impulses, a power he uses to hunt down his girlfriend’s real killer while facing the constant accusations of neighbours and acquaintances.
Radcliffe plays Ig as a man collapsing under grief and public scrutiny, his voice becoming more detached as he unravels the truth and realizes the community is filled with twisted secrets. The role also forces him to shift registers, as Ig is still tender in flashback scenes with Merrin, but grows increasingly unstable as he starts to enjoy the power those horns give him. As Horns is frequently moving from romance to horror to pitch-black comedy, Radcliffe has to match the script’s turn, showing sides of his acting he never got to show during his time on Harry Potter. Furthermore, Radcliffe’s willingness to headline something this strange only two years after leaving Hogwarts behind anticipated the unconventional career choices he would make in the following decade.
4) The Woman in Black
Radcliffe’s first film role after the Harry Potter saga concluded put him inside a haunted house as Arthur Kipps, a grieving widower and young lawyer sent to settle the estate of a remote English manor called Eel Marsh House. Directed by James Watkins from Jane Goldman’s adaptation of Susan Hill’s novel, The Woman in Black keeps Arthur alone on screen for most of its second half as he uncovers the vengeful spirit haunting the property and the string of child deaths she has caused over the decades. That put enormous pressure on Radcliffe, who had to sell the mounting dread for the audience almost entirely through his acting.
The Woman in Black became the most successful British horror movie in twenty years at the UK box office and went on to gross $129 million worldwide against a budget under $17 million, proving Radcliffe could helm commercial success on his own. His performance leans entirely on small choices like trembling hands or a held breath before opening a door, as he searches the house room by room with only a candle for light. That restraint, paired with the character’s quiet grief over his own dead wife, makes Arthur one of Radcliffe’s best roles to date.
3) Weird: The Al Yankovic Story
Eric Appel’s Weird: The Al Yankovic Story asked Radcliffe to play a real and living musician in a biography that treats a wildly fabricated version of Weird Al’s life as unquestioned fact. As Weird Al Yankovic, Radcliffe channels the parody artist’s rise from an accordion-playing outcast into the best-selling comedy musician of all time, except this version of the story invents a torrid romance with Madonna (Evan Rachel Wood) and a kidnapping plot involving Pablo Escobar. There’s even a mentorship from radio host Dr. Demento (Rainn Wilson) that spirals into full action-movie parody by the third act.
The script of Weird: The Al Yankovic Story is hilarious, but the joke only lands if everyone involved is willing to embrace every absurd beat with total sincerity, something that Radcliffe does. The star commits to the project completely, living each increasingly ridiculous plot turn as if they were a serious chapter of a real biopic. He also plays Yankovic’s rise to fame as a genuine hero’s journey, treating the accordion solos and parody lyrics with gravity, which is precisely what makes the satire work. Weird: The Al Yankovic Story became a word-of-mouth favorite in large part because Radcliffe refused to wink at the audience, playing Yankovic’s fictionalized excess with conviction.
2) Kill Your Darlings
In Kill Your Darlings, Radcliffe plays a teenage Allen Ginsberg (Daniel Radcliffe), the future Beat poet arriving at Columbia University in 1944 and falling immediately under the spell of the troubled Lucien Carr (Dane DeHaan). The film tracks Ginsberg’s sexual awakening and infatuation with Lucien alongside the formation of the literary circle that would eventually include Jack Kerouac (Jack Huston) and William S. Burroughs (Ben Foster), building toward the real-life killing of David Kammerer (Michael C. Hall) that fractured the group.
Radcliffe carries the film by leaning into Allen’s shifting persona, playing him as rigid and unsure in his early scenes at Columbia, hunched over textbooks and unable to hold eye contact, before loosening as his psyche in reshapped by drugs, poetry, and heartbreak. Radcliffe’s performance also using posture and vocal rhythm as much as dialogue to mark the change scene by scene, tracking Allen’s transformative experiences. The role required Radcliffe to shed his clean-cut image entirely, including an explicit same-sex love scene that director John Krokidas has said Radcliffe approached without hesitation. Despite coming soon after the final Harry Potter movie, Kill Your Darlings gave Radcliffe a performance that proved his career would last long after the franchise was over.
1) Swiss Army Man
Swiss Army Man opens with Hank (Paul Dano), a man marooned on a deserted island and moments from suicide, interrupted by a corpse, Manny (Daniel Radcliffe), washing ashore. Hank tries to reanimate the corpse, only for the process to cause the body to fart uncontrollably. Just to paint a precise picture, the reanimated body’s flatulence launches Hank across the ocean like a makeshift jet ski within the film’s first few minutes, which should tell you what to expect of one of the strangest premises ever put into film. As Hank teaches Manny to talk and process human emotion, Manny’s decomposing body reveals other bizarre survival tools, from a water-spewing mouth to an erection that functions as a compass. Parallel to the absurd exploration of Manny’s powers, the movie also finds time to reflect on the challenges and rewards of friendship, and our universal need for human connection.
Radcliffe spends the entire duration of Swiss Army Man playing dead in the most literal sense, holding his face fixed while executing stiff-limbed walks and sudden jolts of motion powered by gas. What elevates the performance is how Radcliffe uses Manny’s blank-slate innocence to ask real questions about shame and loneliness, and the small lies people tell to seem normal. Swiss Army Man‘s Sundance premiere led to widely documented walkouts, yet the movie left the festival with the US Dramatic Directing Award, and Radcliffe went on to win Best Actor at the Sitges International Fantastic Film Festival, maybe the only instance of an actor honored for playing a farting corpse.
