The Harry Potter does Daniel Radcliffe even more than a decade later, I’m still not quite over it – no wonder when you can be seen in an iconic role for ten years and in eight films that have shaped an entire generation of children like no other.
But while no article about the 34-year-old can do without a reference to the magician created by Joanne K. Rowling, Radcliffe has long since proven how changeable he is outside of Hogwarts: most recently in “Weird: The Al Yankovic Story” the eponymous cult musician and parodist (currently on Netflix), before that he took on the villain role in the adventure rom-com The Lost City or blasted his way through the FSK:18 action comedy Guns Akimbo.
But how did it all actually start? Before first donning the Wizard’s costume in Harry Potter and the Sorcerer’s Stone (2001), Radcliffe had only two film appearances: one in the television series David Copperfield (based on the Charles Dickens novel of the same name), the others in The Tailor or Panama, the film adaptation of John le Carré’s novel of the same name, with a beautiful all-star cast of Pierce Brosnan, Jamie Lee Curtis, Geoffrey Rush and Brendan Gleeson. No one on set could have imagined that the then nine-year-old Radcliffe would also become a mega star!
Just months before the release of the first Harry Potter film, the spy comedy stars Rush as a tailor named Harry Pendel, who is being blackmailed by a British spy (Pierce Brosnan). Radcliffe plays one of Pendel’s children and his wife Louisa (Jamie Lee Curtis) in the film directed by John Boorman and is only seen in a few scenes describing the Pendels’ family life – for example, here at the breakfast table:
In interview format PeopleTV Radcliffe recalled his first film role: “I was a nine-year-old boy working with Pierce Brosnan, who was going through his James Bond phase at the time,” says the actor. ‘I must have annoyed him. He was very nice to me, but I made a list and asked him to sign pictures for my whole class. And he did, he was so nice!”
And Radcliffe likes to think back to his movie parents: ‘Jamie Lee Curtis was my mom, Geoffrey Rush was my dad: pretty good for my first movie parents! And we shot in Panama! (…) It was quite amazing to start like that, and then I immediately got the part of Harry Potter.”
The Tailor from Panama was moderately successful at the box office, although Brosnan was at the height of his popularity thanks to three Bond films at the time. But what the film has done for Radcliffe’s career is probably invaluable.