“I will say that it’s crazy to me that anyone is still selling my signature, because my signature must be the most devalued form of signature currency in the world. The market is flooded.”
Photo-Illustration: Joe McKendry; Photo: Bruce Glikas/Getty Images
The Maria Bamford Questionnaire is a series of 25 questions designed by the beloved comedian to unearth surprising truths about its respondents. In this edition, you’ll learn about Daniel Radcliffe, the movie, television, and Tony-winning stage actor best known for playing Harry Potter. He can currently be seen playing Arthur Tobin on NBC’s The Rise and Fall of Reggie Dinkins and in the one-man show Every Brilliant Thing at the Hudson Theatre on Broadway.
That’s when I have my main meal of the day. I don’t eat well. I eat like an excited child. Especially after getting home at the end of the night from doing a play, there are very limited things that are still open. So, it’s normally empanadas from Empanada Mama — really authentic cheeseburger and pizza empanadas. What else? Honestly, breakfast food is my favorite, so omelets, bacon and eggs, and anything like that that I can have late at night would probably be my preferred dinner.
If we’re talking about a religion with God or gods, then I’d be harkening back to something like the ancient Greeks had. It sounds like a lot more fun to have badly behaved gods you can tell fun stories about. But if you don’t have to include gods in the religion, then it would just be a religion that, in some way, celebrates the best of people and what we can do.
I’m fundamentally pessimistic about the idea that one person can change the world. I think what you can do is change the lives of people around you and the people you have contact with every day. So a religion that celebrates being there for the people in your life, and acts of kindness that you can affect in your community rather than something bigger and universal, is what I would aspire to.
Neosporin. You’re always going to need Neosporin. Or maybe Band-Aids — something where you know there’s a utility. You’re never going to turn around and find out that … [Interrupts himself.] Well, maybe Neosporin is owned by a giant, evil megacorporation. So maybe if there’s a mom-and-pop Band-Aid company I can work for, I’ll find them. Who’s making homemade Band-Aids in this day and age? I would like to help them.
The Yellowstone volcano. If you’re not afraid of it, you should be. It’s overdue, and when it does erupt, we might lose half of the nation. I saw a documentary about it when I was about 13, and it immediately replaced my fear of nuclear war. It’s imminent in geological terms, but that could mean it could happen next year and it would be right on time, and it could happen in 10,000 or 20,000 years and it would still basically be on time. We’re on borrowed time.
I’ve just completed my first week of previews at this play that is really wonderful but quite intense. It’s a one-man show but not really, because there’s a ton of audience participation. Sometimes, a thing happens where people are really worried that, in order to participate in the show, they have to be really funny or quick or something, and actually, the thing that happens onstage is you see them realize, Oh no, all we have to do is be kind. And that is actually the engine of the play. Hopefully everybody should leave the stage feeling like a bit of a hero.
It’s not roast or crowdwork comedy. The people who are brilliant at that discipline, I watched quite a lot of them in the run up to the show. I watched people talk about their approaches to it, and I found them really interesting. There was one comedian — it was either Brennan Lee Mulligan or Gianmarco Soresi — who talks about a quality of listening where you are genuinely open to everything they’re saying and not just picking through it for the one funny thing you want to hear. So I’ve definitely taken some advice from those crowdwork guys.
My first thought goes to the book I’m reading at the moment, which is a book by a woman called Angela Saini called The Patriarchs. She’s an amazing science writer who’s written two previous books, Inferior and Superior, which are both amazing reads. She has an ability to distill big, complicated topics into something digestible and clear without dumbing it down. And this one, the question the book is asking is “Patriarchy: Why and how?” It’s a huge question, but as you go through her attempting to answer it, you kind of just get a history of patriarchy and ideas about why it has sprung up and where.
Other than that, I, just this morning, met Alysa Liu, and I sent a picture of her and me to our stage managers because we had been talking about her amazing routine at work. But I just texted it with the words, “Guys …” And I guess the picture didn’t come through for a long time, so my stage managers were briefly terrified that I was about to call out of the show tonight. So the last text message I read was them going, “Okay, we’ve just got the picture. We now know everything’s fine.” But they were briefly very panicked.
I don’t know. I’ve got some old books? I wish I could tell you which ones, but I actually can’t remember. Sometimes you’ll find a really obscure book, and the only version of it still in print is a used version on Amazon, so it was probably something like that.
My own brain. I don’t mind listening to everybody else; it’s myself that I tire of. I’ll do a day of press and then I’ll go home, and I will spool back over every answer I gave that day. Ultimately it’s all okay and fine, but my mind will find a way to spin out about the most anodyne thing I’ve said all day. There’s something about doing a day of press and then going into the show at night — the quick turnaround from being the most presentable press-forward version of myself to then being like, Okay, now we’re going to do a pretty heavy monologue about suicide and depression with some audience participation.
I can’t remember the name of this restaurant, but I was on a long road trip once in California, somewhere on the highway shortly after Big Sur, and we had been driving for hours. There had not been a single place to eat, we were all so hungry, and we had no cell service. Eventually, we found a place. It was the first restaurant for two hours. We didn’t realize this, but it was like 20 minutes from a town with more restaurants, so we were like, “We’ve got to stop here.” And it’s maybe the worst food I’ve ever had in my life. It was just like an omelet or something — something where you’re like, This can only go so wrong. Then it was like, Oh, no, this is somehow really bad. They just didn’t have to care. There were no return customers, so they didn’t have to worry about being good. I’m normally pretty easy, but I vowed to never go back there again.
I’m sure there’s a few people I know who would let me crash on their couch. I’ve even got some friends now who I feel like, if we as a family needed shelter and support, we could move in. My kid is, at the moment, incredibly cute, and he’s a value-add to any proposition. In fact, it might be harder to get in alone at this point. They’ll be like, “You have to bring your cute kid as well.” I honestly think there’s some people who would let us stay in perpetuity. We’re pretty easy house guests, and we would find ways of pulling our weight and contributing to the environment.
Going back historically, I’ll go for 30 Rock and just say some page in the page system. I’d have played one of Kenneth’s underlings that he has dominion over. Somebody gave me a box set toward the end of when we were filming Potter, and it became something I really loved, probably when I was initially in New York doing Equis and How to Succeed. So the idea that I’d then be working with so much of that team almost 20 years later is so cool and unexpected.
I’m going to do one retroactively. I have just quit smoking — not “just” anymore, but I’m going to talk about it, because I would like to mention this book to anybody else who’s interested in quitting smoking. I smoked for 20 years pretty heavily, and I was never even thinking about quitting, and then shortly after having my son, the intrusive thoughts of my own death really helped as an incentive to quit. I was given this book that I had been told about many, many years ago called The Easy Way to Quit Smoking, by Alan Carr. It may not work for everybody, but it really worked for me.
I can’t tell you exactly why it worked, other than describing that it did a Jedi mind trick on me. The book starts off by saying, “You will quit, and it will be immediate, enjoyable, and you will not need to use willpower.” I read that and I was like, Well, that’s obviously bullshit. And then it sort of was that! It’s like a continual reframing of your habit. So I really cannot recommend the book enough to anybody who wants to quit. I would say that if you don’t want to quit, don’t, but if you want to, then it’s a great thing to do it with. It’s very easy to mock self-help books, but then occasionally one of them really helps.
I suppose some great writer or artist, but actually most of those writers are probably really neurotic, so you probably wouldn’t want to spend that much time in their brains. Honestly, when you said “consciousness,” the first person who came to my head was Timothy Leary, because I was like, He’d be on a lot of acid, and that would be interesting. I’ve never done LSD, so this will be a way of doing it without doing it. He was probably really good at doing it.
Actually, can I do an animal? I would like to explore the consciousness of a really chill dog. That actually sounds much better. I wouldn’t want to swap with a human if I could avoid it.
Can I say “nothing”? Not that I’ve been perfect in the last week, but nothing’s jumping out. I’m looking back at my texts to see if there’s anybody that I might have said something stupid to, but no, I think I’m good for the last week.
I’m jealous of my son’s ability to live in the moment, and all almost-3-year-olds’ ability to be completely emotionally present wherever they are and not really worry about the future too much. When he is watching 101 Dalmatians, he is the happiest person on earth. It could be that, or when he’s coloring, or when he’s playing with his stuffed animals — whatever he’s doing, he’s just there for it. There is something really cool and weird about having a kid, where they simultaneously make you a lot better at being present and in the moment with them, but also you start worrying about things that are not going to be an actual worry for 20 years. You start worrying about the rest of their lives.
Three, maybe? I’ve dyed it black in a couple of things that I’ve done, and when I was 7 or 8, I went to a costume party as Keith Flint, the drummer from Prodigy. I spiked my hair up and sprayed it red, which is still, to this day, the coolest I have ever looked.
Obviously New Zealand. I’m sure that’s on everyone’s list, but I got to make a movie there once, and it’s a truly delightful country. I would also say Nova Scotia in Canada. I ended up living there for three summers in a row because my partner was making a show there, and it’s one of those places in the world that I will always have a huge affection for. It’s beautiful, the people are lovely and friendly, and everything that everyone says about Canadians I’ve found to be generally true. If you haven’t been, it’s like Ireland but with beautiful weather in the summer.
You can learn how not to be from people you don’t like. When I would see actors on set behaving badly, and then I would watch how the crew were affected by their bad behavior and how people talk about them, that was always a lesson as a young person of, Right, okay, you don’t want to be like that. I realize not everybody has a good memory for names, but if you’re not even trying — if you’re three months into a four-month shoot and you’re still being like, “Clapper loader, move over there” — if you don’t know people’s names, that’s fine, but you should be a little bit embarrassed about it. You could be like, “I’m so sorry I don’t know your name, but could you …” You don’t even have to start with an apology, but you can do it in some sort of a nice way!
Coffee, and yes.
I got to go to the Super Bowl recently, and there’s something about the pure joy of watching people move from a state of being unaware of it to realizing that they are on the Jumbotron. It’s one of my favorite moments to witness in people’s lives: watching somebody stand there, and then somebody else lean in and tap them to point it out, and then they start freaking out. Of course, it’s been ruined now because of the Coldplay concert. We can no longer enjoy Jumbotrons in the same way, because we will always be worried we might be watching the end of two marriages. We don’t have Jumbotron kiss-cam culture in the U.K. so much, and it is something we miss out on.
We mentioned it earlier: roast comedy. And some people are brilliant at it, but anytime there’s any kind of audience participation where somebody gets up and is just being humiliated, I’m like, Get me out of here. I hate this so much.
All of these positive questions are just going to be about my kid. I think there’s something particular about a son to his father. He’s always going to be cute and cuddly with his mom; that’s going to persist for a long time. But I know that, as his dad, there’ll probably be a time when he’s like, “Oh, you don’t need to hug me.” So I feel like, at the moment, him still being cuddly and cute and hugging me and all that stuff — especially knowing that it’s probably going to go at some point — is very beautiful.
My own handwriting. It’s legible; it’s just ugly. I remember on the first day of filming Harry Potter, some people had brought in books, and I was signing them, and the producer said, “You need to make that signature shorter.” I was like, “No, I can’t just do initials. There could be loads of people with my initials, D.R.” And I do wish I had taken his advice, because that would have saved me some time over the years. But I just write my whole name still.
I will say that it’s crazy to me that anyone is still selling my signature, because my signature must be the most devalued form of signature currency in the world. The market is flooded. It’s been out there for 25 years, since I was 10 or 11, and it has never changed. I sign for a lot of professional autograph hunters, and I’m always fascinated: How much can this even be getting you now?
I’ll just be honest here and say that having grown up as a child actor who became very, very fortunate and came into a lot of money when I was young has probably meant that I am not the best at estimating how much money it actually takes to live your life. But definitely less than I have now. I’m sure I could stop working now, but I really enjoy working. I love the jobs I get to do, so I don’t want to stop working, but I’m sure I could just retire and hang out with my kid every day now, which I will want to do at some point. But then there’ll be a time when he doesn’t want to hang out with me, and I’ll have to get back to work again.
There’s been a couple of times in my life that I’ve done something very stupid. I accidentally drank anti-freeze once when I was in a trailer in Canada. I was doing a movie in Vancouver called Horns. I had large prosthetic horns on my face, and I chugged a glass of water. I started feeling incredibly sick, a doctor had to come in, and I had to get fully examined while still in my horn prosthetics. And because I thought I had just drunk water, when they were asking me, “What caused this?” I had no idea why I was suddenly cramping and vomiting. It was rough.
And then, a week later, I was in a different trailer, and I went to fill up a glass with water, and somebody was like, “Whoa, what are you doing? You cannot drink the water in these trailers!” I was like, “Oh, that’s probably what did that to me last week then.” And later on, someone told me that, apparently, there’s signs all over the trailers that I just hadn’t read.
So it may very well be my own stupidity.
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