The Harry Potter actor talks about life after the franchise and his new role as a dad in horror movie The Woman in Black
What scares you and have you ever had an unexplained experience?
I was afraid of ghosts when I was a kid and afraid of the dark and monsters under the bed. When I was a kid and somebody first told me about a nuclear bomb, I would live in fear of nuclear war for the next five years of my life!
I don’t like cockroaches but other than that not too many things freak me out. I don’t believe in ghosts so this film was made entirely by cynics. Strange things have happened but I don’t explain it with ghosts. It requires way more explanation for me than justifying a ghost doing something than a gust of wind.
What was it like portraying a dad in The Woman in Black?
I rather enjoyed it. I didn’t want to do all that horrible acting that people do when they play older people because he’s a young dad. I knew that for people who have seen me for so long in a schoolboy outfit it might be a little bit of a leap for them to see me as a dad. To solve that, I wanted the relationship with my son to be believable, so I asked James Watkins (the director) to audition my godson in real life. He auditioned him alongside four or five other boys, all of whom were very good, and some were more accomplished actors.
But Misha (his godson) and I had the real chemistry for which there is no substitute. It’s hard to find that with a four year-old boy who has just walked onto a film set! It was quite overwhelming on set so I wanted to make sure I was with somebody where the situation wouldn’t freak them out. Because Misha knew me I knew he would be comfortable with it.
Whenever there are kids on a set I always get quite protective of them just because I had such a good time - particularly on the early (Potter) films. It can be an incredibly creative, inspiring, exciting, fulfilling place to be as a kid so I wanted to make sure other kids had that experience or at least a huge amount of fun.
Does the house you shot The Woman in Black in really exist?
The inside of it was a set in a studio. The outside is a real house in Peterborough owned by a really sweet old couple who let us come in and tear up their lawn and replace it with gravestones and make it look horrible. There are lots of houses like that in Britain. I don’t have one but I hear Rupert (Grint) does. He’s got a bigger place and his family all live together, I believe, and there are quite a lot of them. I don’t have the necessity for that many rooms.
What are you doing to prepare for Allen Ginsberg in Kill Your Darlings? (Daniel’s next movie, in which he plays an American poet)
It will be really exciting and I’m doing a lot of research at the moment. To have so much insight into a character and many different people’s perspectives on him is fantastic. It’s also fun because we’re in a period in his life where there are no recordings other than his journals of what he was like at that time.
There’s a certain amount of freedom in terms of the accent. In my head he was from a lower middle class family in New Jersey and while there was an aspirational quality, I wanted a more Jersey sound because he hasn’t been to university.
It’s the director’s (John Krokidas) first film and I’ve been working with him a lot in the last few months. While I’ve got 10 years' experience on a film set, I’ve never trained formally. I have my instincts, which are good a lot of the time, but there’s a point where I fall short and I don’t instinctively know the intention of the character. Over the next few years and with this director I am finding an approach to working, which is kind of solid and always works for me.
Was 'Saturday Night Live' your audition tape to do comedy?
That was a huge amount of fun. We had an absolute blast on that. It was like nothing else I’ve ever done. You’re putting on a full musical comedy from scratch in one week. It’s mad but it’s great.
It essentially was to show I could do more comedy. It was also quite nice because in my head everyone knows I can do an American accent because I’ve been doing it for a year on How To Succeed (Broadway show).
But of course I’d forgotten that nobody else has ever really heard me do an American accent so it was quite nice to show I could do comedy and the accent. It was all useful stuff to have out there!
Words: Victor Draven / The Interview People
Image: Theo Kingma/Rex Features
