Daniel Radcliffe wants to be friends.
That’s what he tells Zoe Kazan at the beginning of the new romantic comedy “What If,” which is currently in theaters. And that’s what the star of the “Harry Potter” movie series is still telling the world, one reporter at a time.
Last week he called us from New York, his latest stop on a press tour. “We started in New York, then went to Toronto, to LA, to Mexico City, and back here to New York. Next we go back to LA, then to London, Dublin, Copenhagen and Amsterdam.”Radcliffe, 25, has been riding the publicity wheel since he was 10, when he starred in a TV production of “David Copperfield.” To promote the eight “Potter” films, the London native traveled around the world, getting mobbed by strangers and seeing building-size photos of himself from Times Square to Beijing.
“One of the few places I haven’t explored is the middle of America. Like a lot of English people, I’ve always had that dream of driving cross-country. But until I do, the easiest way to reach people in those areas is to do satellite feeds, like I’ll be doing tomorrow morning for about three hours. Every few minutes there’s a new sign next to the camera reminding me that I’m talking to ‘Connie and John from Minneapolis’ or whomever. We start with the East Coast morning shows and continue until we get to the Pacific.”
Radcliffe says he is happy to do the publicity grind on behalf of all the other people he works with. “Every single person who works on a film — not just the actors but the camera people and the costumers — they all want the film to be seen, because they worked so bloody hard on it. But, unfortunately, not many reporters want to interview the visual effects supervisor. So this is my chance to shine a light on their work. And often those people are highly educated. We had a costumer on Potter who designed submarines and another who was a world-class mathematician.”
In “What If,” Radcliffe plays an over-educated med-school dropout, the kind of know-it-all who can stop a party cold by explaining the proper way to pronounce “forte.” Yet like a latter-day Hugh Grant, he’s a bumbling fool when it comes to relationships.
“By the second page of the script, I realized I was that sort of annoying character in real life.”
“What If” was filmed in Toronto and premiered there last year under its original title, “The F Word.” (The “F” is for “friends,” which he and his kooky companion Kazan try to remain, despite their mutual attraction.)
Radcliffe says that Toronto, home to a major film festival every September, is one of his favorite cites, along with Vancouver, San Francisco and Melbourne. He adds that when he was a child, he compiled a scrapbook of national flags and capitals, never dreaming that someday he would visit so many of them.
“And it seems like I’ve got friends in all of them,” Radcliffe says, “even if we haven’t actually met.”
