In interview to the Huffpost, Daniel Radcliffe surprised us when he got a angry at a question constantly made to actors. While he showed willingness to talk about many subjects, including Harry Potter, to talk about how difficult shootings can be seemed to contradict him. The main focus of the interview was his new movie, Jungle, that talks about Yossi Ghinsberg’s stories, a man who survived three weeks lost in the Amazon.
“No one wants to hear actors talk about how hard shoots are. One of my pet peeves is actors who — I think the classic example of it is always boxing movies. And the actor is talking about how intense it is to train and all that stuff, but, you know, people are boxers, boxers exist. It’s not a thing that makes ourselves special. I want to be careful with that … I was going home and staying in a hotel at night, and Yossi actually lived it. I don’t want to be like, ‘Oh, yeah, it was so hard.’”
For the role, Radcliffe lost a meaningful amount of weight. He claims that, even though he’s not a methodic actor, he preferred to make cut down on eating to bring more veracity to the character. “I feel like I would be making my job much harder if I would go home and eat steak and potatoes every night.” He says.
Even so, the actor says that filming was distressing sometimes. Using locations in Australia and Colombia, the cast and crew had to adapt to the unpredictable weather – like a tropical storm that delayed filming for a week, or camera operators who had to be tied to rocks in some occasions.
Daniel says that Yossi’s story is more intense and had to soften situations that happened in real life to not make audiences laugh. After reading the script and Yossi’s book, Daniel said he understood that there was a need to simplify some situations. “You want to keep people in the story, and there were some moments that happened to Yossi that were so extreme. If I were an audience member, I would question that, even though now I know it’s true.”
When asked about which other real life person he would like to be, Daniel says he has interest in two stories who did not become a movie yet. It’s the story of a woman called Dr. James Barry, who pretended to be a man and became the first doctor to perform a cesarean section. The other would be the story of Eleanor Roosevelt, the USA’s first first-lady from 1933 to 1945, which he find incredible.
In a lighter mood, Daniel tells he loves the Sharknado movies, even though he wouldn’t want to be in them. The actor also said he loves fantasy football. “I even weird people out […] people know me as being very English. But I am an obsessive American football fan.”
Translated by Nuara Costa / Revised by Beatriz