To say that the entire world has watched actor Daniel Radcliffe grow up is a gross understatement. Best known for playing bespectacled boy wizard Harry Potter across eight feature films, Radcliffe was 12 when the first one was released and 21 by the time the series ended. That’s perhaps what makes his struggles with alcoholism so affecting: we’ve followed him so long as an actor that it’s easy to forget that Radcliffe is a human being, too. His struggles with alcohol don’t often appear in media profiles, but they emerge just enough to paint a fascinating portrait of the dark relationship between alcohol and celebrityhood.
Defense Against The Dark Arts (of Alcoholism)
While Daniel Radcliffe, now 26, is open about his battle with the bottle, it’s not a subject he touches on often in interviews—which is a shame, given how inspiring (and grounding) his story is. In a recent Telegraph profile on the actor, he opened up about his drinking days and his road to recovery. “I change when I’m drunk. I’m one of those people who changes,” Radcliffe admitted in the article. “There is something in any person who drinks in a way that’s clearly not good for them, something that is attracted to that chaos.”
That chaos, for the How To Succeed in Business Without Really Trying actor, seems to be a reaction to the pressures and anxieties of stardom. It’s not just a fear of being typecast as Harry Potter like, say, Adam West and Batman. Radcliffe’s résumé reads like he’s been living a career-long dare to avoid anything that resembles a boy from a wizarding school: a Victorian lawyer in The Woman in Black, beat poet Allen Ginsberg Kill Your Darlings, a corpse in Swiss Army Man. He even went nude on Broadway in his starring role in Equus, for God’s sake. As Radcliffe once told the Guardian: “It is a pressure of living with the thought, ‘Oh, what if all these people are saying I am not going to have a career? What if they are all going to be right and will be laughing and I will be consigned to a bunch of “Where are they now?” lists?'” The fear of being a has-been drove him to the bottle, but the only true way to avoid this career fate, he found, was simply to avoid the bottle. “I can’t tell you what kind of drunk I am because I don’t remember what kind of drunk I am. I think I’m probably great—while I’m conscious. But then I have to be looked after and ultimately I don’t want to wake up to 20 text messages along the lines of, ‘Where are you? Dude, are you OK?’”.
Addiction, Center Stage
In a 2012 interview with ShortList, Radcliffe acknowledged that drinking hadn’t just been “unhealthy and damaging to [his]body and [his]social life”—it turned him into a young, alcoholic hermit. “I was living in constant fear of who I’d meet, what I might have said to them, what I might have done with them, so I’d stay in my apartment for days and drink alone,” he said in the interview. “I was a recluse at 20. It was pathetic—it wasn’t me. I’m a fun, polite person, and it turned me into a rude bore.” It’s a story that’s all too familiar for alcoholics—the joyless, lonely drinking—but it’s also remarkable to hear the story told by someone so young, talented and in the public eye.
Radcliffe wasn’t always open about his alcoholism, though. Quite the opposite. He was regularly showing up to the Harry Potter set drunk. In fact, in the ShortList piece, he acknowledged that his make-up people were constantly smelling vodka on his breath. “I have a very addictive personality. It was a problem. People with problems like that are very adept at hiding it,” he said. “I don’t want to go into details, but I drank a lot and it was daily—I mean nightly,” he said. Still, ever the professional, he claims he never drank on set. He seemed to be fighting as many hangovers as he was fighting dark forces as Harry Potter: “I can honestly say I never drank at work on Harry Potter. I went into work still drunk, but I never drank at work. I can point to many scenes where I’m just gone. Dead behind the eyes.” (There’s even a Vanity Fair feature that shrewdly guesses which scenes where Radcliffe was noticeably dead-eyed.)
How To Succeed At Sobriety By Really Trying
Now more than two years sober, Radcliffe seems comfortable in his own skin, complete with a flourishing post-Potter career. In 2016 alone, he’s in three films—the aforementioned Swiss Army Man, Now You See Me 2 and Imperium—and is currently starring in the Off Broadway play Privacy. The rigors of this sort of career are not conducive to alcoholism—or, at least, being successfully drunk in the public eye. Radcliffe also credits sobriety for reclaiming the interests he’d lost through drinking. As he told the Telegraph: “I was a really voracious reader in my teens and that was one of the things I found drinking took away from me, bizarrely, as a side effect. I didn’t have the compulsion or energy to read anything. So I’ve got that back.”
Radcliffe leaned on alcohol to get him through his fears during his Potter days, but he’s turned to running to get him through recovery: “Like the cliché of anybody who is quitting something, I really got into exercise,” he said. Starting with “epic five-hour walks” whenever the urge to drink seized him, he graduated to running and hitting the gym instead. “I barely think about it [alcohol],” he said, calling sobriety “lovely.” And even if he suggests that he wishes there was a magic spell to make his past problems disappear, Radcliffe’s recovery is as beautiful, exciting and powerful as any story JK Rowling could conceive.
Photo courtesy of Gage Skidmore via Flickr [CC0 (https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/2.0/)] (resized and cropped)
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