What Daniel Radcliffe Worries About

Daniel Radcliffe opens up about fame, self-doubt, and falling in love in this Sunday’s PARADE with Dotson Rader.

In the exclusive extras below, the 22-year-old star talks about the cause he wants to put his Potter fortune behind, his new film, The Woman in Black, his love of poetry, and more.

On giving back.
“I got involved in The Trevor Project [a charity which works to prevent young gay people from committing suicide] in late 2008 when I was in New York doing Equus. A few of my friends had made me aware of it. It sounded like such a fantastic thing. People need it. The suicide rate for gay teens is four times that of straight kids. I couldn't believe that nothing like this had existed before. I think that any free-thinking person who becomes very wealthy and has strong opinions on things would get involved with something like The Trevor Project or scholarships for schools or whatever. Fame is very useful in directing attention toward those things.

“I got paid so well for doing the Harry Potter films, it's ridiculous. If somebody asked me, 'Did you think you deserve that money?' No, of course I didn't. 'But would you have taken it anyway?' Of course. I happened to have found this industry where people get paid stupid amounts of money. That's the reality. I feel almost guilty for having done so well out of Potter. But there’s a moral imperative to help others. You know, the fact that I wake up in my lovely apartment in New York and get to stroll down here and do a couple of shows, and there is somebody in some country waking up wondering where he's going to live that week—it's a horrendous feeling. There is a sense that you have to do something. I feel Brad Pitt would agree that the way to help is to really get behind things that you're passionate about, like The Trevor Project. You have to give back.”

On homophobia.
“Realizing that other people have a problem with [homosexuality] was the weirdest thing for me. As a kid it wasn't even something that was mentioned. It was never something that was even explained to me. It was just, “That's Mark and he's gay.” Mark was just another friend of my dad's who would talk about his boyfriend instead of his girlfriend. I was 5. I didn't care. It seemed perfectly normal, and still does....It just drives me crazy...that people can make such sweeping, ignorant statements and bring religion into it....Why would you want a god that’s up there picking and choosing who he lets in?...That doesn't make any sense."

On marriage.
“I've got a great example to look at in my parents, because they've been married for at least 25 years and, I think, they were together for about five more before that. So they've been together a long time. I wouldn't recommend anybody marrying an actor, really. [laughs] Of course, there are cases where it works, but I’m an actor and I know what I’m like. Actors and actresses are generally pretty neurotic.”

On work — worrying about it, achieving the most.
“I do worry about things like I'm not going to be good enough or my next film is not going to do well enough and that eventually people will go, ‘Oh well, why don't you move on and do something else?’ … Of course I worry about all of those things, but it comes out of a place of pride, in my knowing that I'm smart enough, good enough, hard-working enough to achieve. I now want to make as big a mix of everything as I can, from stage acting to film, and just keep working. What's lovely is that [my fame] will really help get a small independent film made, because my name carries bankability at the moment, and it will do for a few more years. If you look at somebody like Brad Pitt or George Clooney, those are guys who have immense fame and do some very successful commercial films, but they balance it by doing stuff they love, that interests them. Both could have gone down just playing romantic leads for the rest of their careers and made a very nice living. But they wanted to do different stuff. The majority of Clooney's career, acting and directing, is what I look at. If I can achieve half of what he has achieved, I'll be happy.”

On his love of poetry.
“I think true poetry is a color—it's as fundamental as that. It can provoke a profound, basic human reaction. Understanding what the poet is saying comes from something fundamental in us that is moved by the musicality of language. I love T. S. Eliot’s 'The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock.' I was so obsessed by it. That poem is how I see myself. It’s how people feel who have an inner life they struggle to express. That’s what's so powerful about that poem. To me it's about somebody who wants the world to be the world in his imagination and is constantly disappointed that it is not. Poetry once was not an elitist thing. Somewhere along the line, writing poetry became viewed as a kind of girlish thing to do, not something that real men should be concerning themselves with. English writer Tony Harrison is a modern poet and my hero. It's tough, muscular, brutish, angry language, and it's exciting to read.”

On his new film, The Woman in Black.
“On the surface it's about a young lawyer, a widower, who is given a task to collect the paperwork of a recently deceased woman in her house in rural England. He goes and is terrorized by the ghost of a different dead woman. Every character that you meet in the film has been touched by bereavement at some point. It’s character-driven. Stanley Kubrick said that any film about the supernatural is inherently consoling because it implies an afterlife. That's what our film is about, really. On the surface it's about being terrified, but actually it's about love.”

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