The face of the highest-grossing movie franchise of all time obviously never got the memo that big stars aren’t supposed to spend two days submerging themselves in a tank filled with frigid, viscous brown goo.
That, however, is just what Daniel Radcliffe did while shooting his new gothic horror movie, “The Woman in Black.” It opens Friday. He was happy to do it, thanks.
The 22-year-old actor was eager to prove he has plenty of magic left for his first major film role since “Harry Potter” ended. “It was very cold, but because of my kind of slight Napoleon complex of being a little shorter, I kind of feel that I have to tough it out and prove to everybody that I can do it,” Radcliffe tells The News. “I think it was about a day and a half before I asked for a blanket.
“We had to stop a couple of times because I couldn't put up with the cold,” he says. “It was a long, tough shoot, but it was great. It was good fun.” Based on the 1983 novel by Susan Hill, “The Woman in Black” is the tale of widowed lawyer Arthur Kipps (Radcliffe), who is assigned to retrieve documents from a recently deceased client’s manor miles removed from the closest village in the English countryside.
Cut off from the mainland by the tides of the surrounding marshland — hence the goo — Kipps soon finds he’s not alone inside Eel Marsh House; there’s a malevolent ghost who preys on the children of anyone unfortunate enough to cross her path. Directed by James Watkins and also starring Ciaran Hands and recent Oscar-nominee Janet McTeer, it’s the type of classic British horror film best watched through one’s fingers.
“We ended up making a very dark horror movie,” he says, flashing his trademark mischievous grin. “But what would give us satisfaction was when we’d film something and we’d go, oh that’s really going to scare people.”
Ghosts don’t scare Radcliffe in real life. Not much else does, either. He did, after all, bare a lot more than his soul in the 2008 production of “Equus” on Broadway. His one true phobia is that audiences won’t want to see him do anything but run around with a wand. The Boy Who Lived is now a young man who wants to move on.
“I am nervous, because I’ve never had a film come out where there isn’t the inevitability of huge, millions of people going to see it,” he says. “So yeah, I am a bit nervous. I want people to see it and I want them to enjoy it, and hopefully they will.”
For a guy who has accomplished so much at such a young age — he wrapped up a franchise that earned $7.7 billion at the box office worldwide, led a highly successful Broadway revival of “How to Succeed in Business Without Really Trying” and took a turn as host of “Saturday Night Live,” all within the last few months — Radcliffe seems to harbor an excessive amount of self-doubt.