Steven Prusakowski
It would not take magic for people to recognize Daniel Radcliffe for his most famous role. For more than a decade of his life he was everybody’s favorite boy wizard, capturing the imagination and hearts of book fans as Harry Potter. Since the series concluded, the actor took on challenges much bigger than Voldemort.
Instead of facing more fantasy villains, he took on the powerful world of theater. Radcliffe has been on Broadway several times and the West End in productions of Equus, How to Succeed in Business Without Really Trying, The Cripple of Inishmaan, and Merrily We Roll Along (for which he won a Tony Award), among others. These roles won him acclaim, multiple nominations, and the increasing respect of the acting community, who watched the actor spread his wings and forge a new path as an artist. He most recently was nominated for his interactive, one-man show Every Brilliant Thing.
Radcliffe’s work has been heavily comedic in nature, with roles in films like the farting-corpse hit Swiss Army Man and playing “Weird Al” Yankovic in Weird: The Al Yankovic Story, as well as the anthology series Miracle Workers. He was a natural, with incredibly sharp timing and his now trademark critically praised deadpan delivery, and physical commitment. People may even say he was a wizard at comedy. But comedy was not always in the cards.
In a recent interview, Radcliffe reflected on his path. “No not particularly. I mean I wasn’t like… I’ve always enjoyed making people laugh but I wouldn’t say that I was the class clown. I do think it’s something that I always gravitated towards in terms of what I watched like when I was working on Harry Potter I wasn’t going back to my dressing room in between and reading like and watching like super epic big movies. I was going back and watching Alan Partridge and The Office and you know Fawlty Towers and all this sort of classic British stuff.”
Radcliffe continued, “Then when I was doing Equus in New York a friend of mine came over to visit me and he said like you’re working in New York right now. You need to watch what is now the quintessential New York comedy of right now and he gave me a box set of 30 Rock DVDs. And that was the moment where I first got into it and then you know if you had told me then that I’d be working with the creators of that show 15 years later I would not have believed that my life would go that well.”
Now in The Fall and Rise of Reggie Dinkins, the actor is playing Arthur Tobin, a washed-up, pretentious documentarian and Academy Award-winning filmmaker who is hired by disgraced ex-football star Reggie Dinkins (Tracy Morgan) to film a comeback documentary in the style of The Last Dance. Living with the family and inserting himself into every situation, Arthur’s serious artistic ambitions clash hilariously with the chaos around him. The series, from the creators of 30 Rock (Robert Carlock and Sam Means, with Tina Fey involved), also features a strong comedic cast including Erika Alexander, Bobby Moynihan, Precious Way, and Jalyn Hall.
Radcliffe was added to the series after previously working with Carlock and Means on projects like the Unbreakable Kimmy Schmidt movie and the animated Mulligan. His long-standing love for their style of comedy made it an easy yes. It is certainly one of the funniest shows on TV, earning Gotham TV Award nominations, including for Radcliffe, and a TCA Award nomination for Comedy series. The comedy has quickly become a critics’ darling (including a rave review from Awards Radar) and a fan favorite.
The actor added in the interview about the appeal of the role. “I mean, you know, I feel like if you look at Robert Carlock and Sam Means’s shows and like if you look at 30 Rock and you look at Kimmy Schmidt, there’s quite a few… English characters in there and they really like putting in the mouths of English people… So I’m very happy to be the mouthpiece for all their English jokes.”
On the character dynamic, he noted, “Arthur does take himself incredibly seriously and that’s where I sort of some of the comedy is from… I like to think that I am not a particularly pretentious Englishman, but… playing this character is not a huge reach for me.”
When if comes to on set life “We’re doing a show with Tracy Morgan. Like, there’s always going to be a little bit of chaos… Tracy brings the chaos, and then we all sort of bring enough structure around him… it makes it incredibly fun to do.”
Radcliffe’s journey from boy wizard to acclaimed stage performer to comedic standout is one of an artist unafraid of new challenges and clearly having a the time of his life doing it. As he put it simply in the interview, he’s “incredibly lucky” and “excited to be here.”
Watch my full interview with Daniel Radcliffe below and watch The Rise and Fall of Reggie Dinkins streaming on Peacock.
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