Daniel Radcliffe Admits To Drinking During "Harry Potter"
In an interview with Heat, a British entertainment magazine, Radcliffe, now 22, admitted to drinking every night when filming the franchise. “I loved the fact I suddenly could talk to people and feel so entertaining and so interesting,” he said. “But after a while, you’re living under such a cloud of shame about what you’ve done and the dread of who you might see, what you might have said to them, what you might have done to them.”
Though he didn’t drink on set, Radcliffe said that after drinking all night, he often went to work still drunk. “I can point to many scenes where I’m just gone,” he said. “Dead behind the eyes.”
It seemed that the young "Harry Potter" star was on the same track as other child stars like Lindsay Lohan, and Radcliffe himself realized that. “Blackout was kind of my thing,” he admitted. So he tried, and is still trying, to get away from that stereotype and understood that being a “really annoying, loud, inappropriate, messy drunk” was not helping his image. He sobered up in August of 2010.
Some people may assume that being in the spotlight for so long from such a young age is what triggered his drinking problem, but Radcliffe disagrees. He said being on set was “fantastic” and that his alcoholism would have come with our without his fame. “I have a very addictive personality,” he explained.
“What ‘Potter’ did do was put me around people who were older than me, and I heard all of their amazing stories about their drunk nights. I just started thinking, ‘That’s what I want,’” he told the L.A. Times. “I don’t think I ever had one, great drunk night, but I had heard about them, and that was what I was desperately trying to pursue.”
Having been sober for 18 months, Radcliffe’s career has been going steady after the "Harry Potter" franchise. He performed at last year’s Tony Awards and received raving reviews for his Broadway musical "How To Succeed In Business Without Really Trying." His newest film "The Woman in Black" is now in theaters.
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