Daniel Radcliffe says he was often drunk while filming Harry Potter
“Hi. My name ish Darry Potter.”
Actor Daniel Radcliffe opened up about his former drinking problem in a recent interview with Heat magazine, including the fact that he would sometimes show up on the set of the Harry Potter films “just gone.”
In the interview the 22-year-old star reveals he has an addictive personality that led to his affinity for the Goblet of Firewater, and that things got pretty bad there for a while.
Heat: Really? There were never any stories of you going on wild benders…
Daniel Radcliffe: People with problems like that are very adept at hiding it. It was bad. I don’t want to go into details but I drank a lot and it was daily – I mean nightly. I can honestly say I never drank at work on Harry Potter. I went into work still drunk, but I never drank at work.
Heat: You mean Harry Potter had a hangover?!
Daniel Radcliffe: I can point to many scenes where I’m just gone. Dead behind the eyes.
He goes on to say that he doesn’t blame the fame for his problem and that he thinks “it would have happened anyway. I think it’s just in me.”
Daniel’s history with alcohol abuse is no secret, he talked about it in a previous interview with GQ earlier this year. “I became so reliant on [alcohol] to enjoy stuff,” he said. “There were a few years there when I was just so enamored with the idea of living some sort of famous person’s lifestyle that really isn’t suited to me.”
It was after filming the final film in the series, Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows: Part 2, that Radcliffe began to turn his life around. “There’s no shame in enjoying a quiet life. And that’s been the realization of the past few years for me,” he says. He adds, “As much as I would love to be a person that goes to parties and has a couple of drinks and has a nice time, that doesn’t work for me. I’d just rather sit at home and read, or go out to dinner with someone, or talk to someone I love, or talk to somebody that makes me laugh.”
So Harry Potter was boozing like a rock star, but what about the girls? Heat asked him about whether or not he took frequent dips in the groupie pond, to which Daniel responded with:
“Not at all. I was always very nervous about the groupie thing. I like to like somebody before I sleep with them, I really do. You know you’re going to have to talk to them afterwards, even if it is a one-night stand. I have… I mean that has happened, but generally speaking I’ve known the person. Someone once said to me, ‘You can go outside and pick from the girls at the stage door.’ And I said, ‘No, that’s not me.’ [Stops.] Because, to do that, you kind of have to be a dick.”
Well it’s a good thing little Harry wasn’t all that promiscuous – after all, everybody knows unprotected sex can cause Hogwarts. 😉
