Daniel Radcliffe on Whether He’d Return to Harry Potter Role and Starving for ‘Jungle’

Although Harry Potter may be back on the page and stage with J.K. Rowling’s Harry Potter and the Cursed Child, star Daniel Radcliffe has long since distanced himself from the role with tougher fare such as Swiss Army Man and the recently released skinhead thriller Imperium.

But the star doesn’t rule out a return to the character if Warner Bros. goes ahead with a film.

“I’m never going to close the door; that would be a stupid thing to do,” he told The Hollywood Reporter at the Deauville Film Festival, where he accepted the Rising Star award. “But I think I’ll be happy enough and secure enough to let someone else play it.

“At the moment it’s not even a concern because I’m too young to play the character, but even in 10 years’ time I would still feel strange about going back to it.

“There’s a part of me that’s like, some things are better left untouched. If we went back to Potter, there’s a chance we’d make what Star Wars: The Force Awakens was to the original Star Wars, but there’s also the chance that we’d make Phantom Menace,” he joked. “So I don’t want to go back to anything like that and maybe sour what people have already loved.”

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Though he says he has not yet seen the play, he thinks star Jamie Parker, who has received rave reviews, could take on the film role.

As for the upcoming Fantastic Beasts and Where to Find Them, Radcliffe says he is in the dark about the story and script and lauds star Eddie Redmayne. “He’s an Oscar winner, dude, he doesn’t need my advice,” he joked.

He wrapped the upcoming Jungle at the beginning of the summer after a tough four-month shoot in Colombia and Australia. The film is based on Yossi Ghinsberg’s memoir about a trip through the Amazon that went wrong.

Radcliffe went on an extreme diet for the role to slim down for the look of the adventurer that was lost in the jungle for several weeks. “It was hard physically because I wasn’t really eating. We were doing very long days and I was operating on not very much food,” he said, adding that he had to begin dieting four weeks before the shoot to get the look right.

He’ll share the screen with Avengers: Age of Ultron star Thomas Kretschmann, whom he calls “one of the craziest people I’ve ever met — and he wouldn’t mind me saying that.”

Radcliffe is currently working on a script that he hopes to direct in the future. “It’s not like it’s bad, it’s just not ready yet,” he says.

He cites the director of Seven Psychos and In Bruges as an influence, adding: “If I can be a poor man’s Martin McDonagh, I’d be very happy.”