Daniel Radcliffe attends Broadway Talks

Daniel Radcliffe attended 92nd Street Y's Broadway Talks yesterday in New York, where he talked with Jordan Roth, about How to Succeed, The Woman in Black and more.

Dan admitted that he had been taking singing lessons for about three and a half years, and what got him started was trying to sing a better version of The Milky Bar song for Equus.

• Dan talked at great length about How to Succeed, and his personal aspirations for it, including hoping that his goal was, frankly, not to suck on stage. He found that he performed better on stage than screen because there were rarely any breaks from character while performing, whereas with film you could be done for the day on set and separate from the character and film.

• As mentioned in numerous interviews, Dan's a huge fan of The History Channel... the international version, which actually does broadcast actual historic documentaries, and not the reality programmes the US version airs.

• On Harry Potter, the anecdote on when producer David Heyman found Dan for the first time at a London play many years back was brought up, and how he, Dan, realised he got the role of Harry pretty much for his big blue eyes, which he jokingly called his 'orphan eyes', given that he has so far played three orphans (Harry, David Copperfield, and Maps in December Boys).

• Dan admitted that as crazy as Harry Potter premieres are, he found them 'hysterically funny' as he found the recognition to be a bit strange.
• One thing Dan realised he had increasingly common with Harry as the books went on, especially the last few, was their argumentative natures, which Dan called bratty and snide. Dan jokingly wondered if JK Rowling had been deliberately noted this about him, and wrote Harry just as that.

• Dan does hope to do some behind-the-camera work in the future, as he has said many times in the past, though he'd rather prefer to direct a small, independent film, and not a huge epic fantasy like Harry Potter.

• Dan got to see a rough cut of his supernatural thriller, The Woman in Black, recently, and called it a "slow-burning Victorian Gothic film" that frightened him so much that he nearly fainted at points. He enjoyed the themes of loss in the story, as his character, Arthur Kipps, was a widower; he also argued that no one in their right mind would visit the home of The Woman in Black, but Kipps had a good enough reason to.

• Dan praised various Harry Potter costars, including of course Gary Oldman, David Thewlis whom he said is wonderful, Michael Gambon, Imelda Staunton, and especially pointed out David Bradley (Filch) and Gemma Jones (Madam Pomfrey), who had done a great deal of work on stage as well as screen.

• The topic of the Tony Awards, and Dan's obvious snub, was brought up in discussion. Dan said that everyone around him, including fans, came up to him and consoled him on the snub as though a relative had died, jokingly stating that they'd say things like 'are you OK?' about it, which he found a bit shocking. He was, however, rather pleased and humbled at even being considered in the same category as those actually nominated, as is happy for How to Succeed's eight nominations.

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source: 92y.org
Photos: Bruce Glikas/Getty Images