He was the world’s most famous child star. Then he had to figure out what came next.
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On August 23, 2000, after an extensive search and a months-long rumble of media speculation, a press conference was held in London. There, the actor who’d been chosen to play Harry Potter in the first movie adaptation of J. K. Rowling’s best-selling novels was unveiled, alongside the film’s other two child leads. According to the on-screen caption in the BBC’s coverage of the event, this 11-year-old’s name was “Daniel Radford.”
Until the previous year, Daniel Radcliffe, as he was actually known, hadn’t had any acting experience whatsoever, aside from briefly playing a monkey in a school play when he was about 6. When he’d auditioned for a British TV adaptation of David Copperfield, it was less out of great hope or ambition than because he’d been having a rough time at school and his parents (his father was a literary agent; his mother, a casting agent) thought that the experience of auditioning might boost his confidence. For an hour or two, the idea went, he’d get to see a world that none of his classmates had seen. Instead, he found himself cast as the young Copperfield, acting opposite Maggie Smith and Bob Hoskins. And now this.