First News interviews Daniel Radcliffe

In his first role since Harry Potter, Daniel Radcliffe plays Arthur Kipps in the creepy tale of The Woman in Black, based on the famous book. Daniel talks to us about being scared and gunge-like mud.

After Harry Potter you had lots of options. Did you decide you wanted to do a horror film?

I don’t think it’s ever as strategic as people think. Obviously you know you have an idea of what you want to do and what you don’t want to do next. On the last day of filming of Potter I read the script for The Woman in Black for the first time and I was blown away by the fact it was a brilliantly written script about something I’ve never leaned towards: horror. The fact that I was reading it and I was so into it made it even more exciting. I read the script and loved it.

 

What is the most bizarre role you’ve been offered?

I was once asked to be in a remake of The Wizard of Oz and asked Rupert and Emma as well. I was to play the cowardly lion, but this was a karate-kicking cowardly lion. Then, presumably, Emma was going to play Dorothy and Rupert was, I guess, scarecrow. That was kind of a weird thing.

 

You play a young father in this film. Was that an appeal?

It was, but the main thing for me in this film was about the energy level of the character being very different from my own. Harry was somebody where you know my own natural energy is very useful to play that character, but Arthur is somebody who’s become completely detached from life and the world and people, so that was a challenge. Playing a father was something I was looking forward to and something I was a little bit nervous about, because people had seen me in a school outfit for ten years!

 

What was the hardest part about playing Arthur Kipps?

As I said before, the energy levels, that was something that took quite a lot of time to get my head around. In terms of a physical challenge, there was one scene where I was recovering a body from the marsh and it was like a 3m long, 3m deep, 3m wide pit of mud. It wasn’t exactly mud, it was kind of like the gunge you get on a Sunday morning kids’ show, just mud-coloured. I thought it was really cool.

 

The film is really spooky. Were you spooked when you went home from the set?

I’m a slightly jumpy person anyway. At the time I wasn’t particularly getting more scared than normal. But I went home not long ago and I had one of the American posters for the film in my house. It’s a sepia photo of two kids with their eyes scratched out. It was just sitting in the corner of my house and in the middle of the night I’d got up to get a glass of water and I jumped because I thought there were two eyeless children in my house.

 

What sort of things scare you now or when you were a kid?

I was scared of the dark as a kid. I’ve always had to have noise or a light on when I’m asleep. I was also terrified of the spiders in the film Jumanji. They freaked me out for, like, a week. Other than that all my fears are kind of quite rational. Being buried alive has always been a thought that has terrified me and really freaked me out. As a kid I remember obsessing over it because it could happen any day!

 

Did the mud tank scene feel like being buried alive?

It probably did. If I wasn’t having so much fun I probably would have thought that, but I think that in a moment like that, basically it’s kind of like: “I’m in here and I’m now going to show how tough I am.”

 

Was it strange after ten years on the Potter set to work with a different crew and on a different set?

No, not at all. In fact, a lot of the crew carried over. Simon Wilkinson, who looked after my glasses for ten years on Potter, was looking after the props on this as well. It was very refreshing to see my name on the call sheet next to a different character’s name. There was a little thrill to that.

 

You’ve been on film sets since you were ten. Do you think you missed out on anything?

Not particularly. All the growing up moments happened to me anyway, but they just happened on set. I mean, yes, I missed out on a normal education at school, but I still got a very good education and I still had a lot of interaction. It was just a different way of growing up.

 

The Woman in Black is in cinemas now, rated 12A.

This film is a ghost story and some scenes may scare easily-frightened or very young children.

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