Nobody knows—nobody can ever know—what it’s like to be Daniel Radcliffe. There isn’t a single person in the whole Potter project who had more pressure on him or her than Daniel. From the moment he was cast he was never fully allowed to be a Muggle kid. Not really. And while the same was true for Emma and Rupert, for Daniel the spotlight was just that little bit more intense. He was the Boy who Lived, after all, but he was also the boy who would never live a normal life. I had the privilege, like most ordinary teenagers, of being able to make some shitty decisions in my youth. The worst repercussions for me were having a Polaroid mugshot hung up on an office wall in HMV Guildford. For Daniel, the consequences of being a regular teenage hooligan would have been so much weightier. Almost from day one, people were taking pictures of him, secretly trying to record him, trying to catch him in a compromising or vulnerable position. At no point did he—could he—give them the opportunity to do so. The weight of the films rested almost solely on his shoulders.
I have such respect for the way he learned to cope with that pressure, and such love for him as a person. Of all the grand names I found myself surrounded by during my time on the Potter films, it’s Daniel from whom I’ve perhaps learned the most, and in whom I see myself to the greatest extent.
Perhaps that seems strange, given that we were cast partly because of our similarities to the roles we played. Harry and Draco are enemies from the off, after all. But I don’t see it that way. I would say Harry and Draco are two sides of the same coin, and I see myself and Daniel in a similar way.
We mostly kept our distance at first. Whenever we saw each other around set, we limited ourselves to a characteristically British nod of the head and a “Morning, you alright? Sweet.” While I was busy larking around with the Slytherin lads, Daniel was busy being busy. Our paths didn’t cross as much as you might imagine. When our paths did cross, what struck me about him was his fierce intelligence and almost savant-like memory for obscure cricket stats and Simpsons trivia. We’d sit on our broomsticks between takes while the crew re-set a scene, doing Simpsons quizzes, and nobody had a deeper knowledge of niche facts than Daniel.
As the films progressed we grew friendlier and started seeing each other a lot more. I’d go round to his house from time to time to watch the cricket, get a pizza and probably smoke too many cigarettes. (We were definitely two youngsters who were smoking before our time! A visitor to Leavesden would have a good chance, if they were to wander behind one of the dodgy old warehouses and look under a tower of scaffolding, of seeing Harry, Draco and Dumbledore huddled together against the cold, drinking tea and enjoying what we euphemistically referred to as “a breath of fresh air.”) The more I got to know Daniel, the more I saw how similar we were in so many ways. We’re both hyper-aware of our surroundings and the emotions of others. We’re both emotionally very sensitive, easily affected by the energy around us. It always seemed to me, and it still does, that if I had been an only child like Daniel, free from the influence of three older brothers, I would have ended up a lot more like him. And if Daniel had enjoyed the wayward influence of Jink, Chris and Ash, it wouldn’t surprise me if he’d have ended up a lot more like me. And there is a symmetry to that, because I think the same is maybe true of Harry and Draco. I would never have understood this in the early days of Potter, but as the films progressed it became increasingly apparent to me. And one of the reasons it became apparent to me, I see now, was Daniel’s developing skill as an actor.
Daniel would be the first to admit that when we all started out none of us really knew what we were doing. Sure, he and I had been on film sets before, but how good can somebody that young really be? Daniel, however, wanted to get better from the get-go. He always looked back on his previous work with a bit of a frown, and he had the admirable quality of knowing he could cruise through the role on auto-pilot, but not wanting to. He cared, deeply, and from day one he set about becoming the very best actor he could be. Which is quite a task when you’ve been given the role of Harry Potter. In my opinion it was the hardest part to play. Harry is and always was the staple, the solid ground, the reliable character. He has to be like that for the rest of us to dance around him. Draco’s aloofness, Ron’s jokes, Hermione’s sharp wit, Hagrid’s bumbling kindness, Voldemort’s wickedness, Dumbledore’s wisdom: all of these are thrown into relief by Harry’s constant, unwavering solidness. It takes a special kind of skill to achieve that solidness and still draw the eye and move the audience.
Daniel learned fast and learned well. He quickly became a very special actor. Maybe it was because he, more than any of us, was surrounded by brilliance and it inevitably rubbed off on him. Perhaps he had the kernel of brilliance in him to start with. Whatever the truth, he soon started to hold the attention of everybody around him whenever he was on set. It was inspiring for the rest of us. We followed his lead, and if ever there was a person you’d want to follow into battle, Daniel, like Harry, was him. He was great at reminding us, simply by the way he held himself, to take our opportunity seriously, while having a lot of fun doing so.
Even if I didn’t always follow Daniel’s lead in that respect, his conscientious attitude eventually rubbed off on me. I learned more from watching and acting alongside him than I did from any of the adults. When the time came for Draco to develop as a character, if I had any success at all in portraying that development, it was in part thanks to watching Daniel.
Draco’s development was not something I gave a great deal of thought to during the early films. We establish in Philosopher’s Stone that he’s the slimy git. In Chamber of Secrets we see something of his privilege: he gets the best broomstick and effectively buys his way onto the Quidditch team. He’s the kid at school whose dad buys him a Ferrari for his first car. He doesn’t seem to have an ounce of humanity, but although the whole Muggle world learns to dislike him, there is no sense of his snottiness snowballing into something worse. As a result, I mostly spent the first five films standing in the corner sneering. I didn’t need to think too much about Draco’s development, because there wasn’t any. He was always the same.
Then, in Harry Potter and the Half-Blood Prince, everything changed. Through Draco, we see that the bullies are often the bullied. Very early in the shoot the director, David Yates, took me to one side. “If we can just get one per cent of empathy towards Draco,” he said, “we’ll have succeeded. Remember that you’re planning to do the worst thing that’s ever happened in the wizarding world: kill Dumbledore. When you hold that wand, it’s the power of holding an army in your hand. We need to feel for you. We need to think, he had no choice.”
Draco Malfoy was the boy who had no choice. Dominated by his overbearing father, coerced by the Death Eaters, cowed into fear of his life by Voldemort, his actions were not his own. They were the actions of a boy whose agency has been ripped from him. He could not make his own decisions, and the turn his life had taken terrified him. The scene in which this became most apparent was when Harry comes across him crying at the sink, before they duel and Harry uses the sectum sempra spell. It was one of the few scenes Daniel and I performed just the two of us, and I felt unfairly praised for it. For me, the genius was in the writing. But if I did manage to raise my game to follow Draco’s development, it was in large part down to what I’d learned from watching Daniel. I couldn’t get away with being the boy sneering in the corner; I had to find a way to put meat on the bones of the character.
For me, Draco’s arc in the final films gets to the very heart of one of the main themes of the Harry Potter stories: the theme of choice. It’s an arc that reaches its climax during the scene in Malfoy Manor. Harry is disfigured. Draco is called upon to identify him. Is this Harry Potter, or is it not? There was no discussion on set about whether Draco knows for sure if this is Harry. My opinion is that he knows exactly who it is. So why doesn’t he say so? The reason, it seems to me, is that the boy who had no choice finally gets one. He can choose to identify Harry, or he can choose to do the right thing. At every moment up until then, he’d have dobbed Harry in. Finally, though, he understands what Dumbledore told Harry early in the story: that it’s our choices, not our abilities, that show us what we truly are.
That’s why I see Harry and Draco as two sides of the same coin. Harry is the product of a family who love him so much, they are prepared to die for him. Draco is the product of a family who bully and abuse him. But when they have the freedom to make their own choices, they reach a similar destination.