How do you feel about watching yourself as a teenager? Probably not that great! Now imagine if motion pictures of you when you were young were not only widely available but shaped a generation’s childhood? That’s the pickle Daniel Radcliffe finds himself in. The actor was discussing the Harry Potter films, the last of which was released a decade ago this July, and which made him a star. And he couldn’t help but acknowledge he has some difficulty looking at his younger self.
“I’m intensely embarrassed by some of my acting, obviously,” Radcliffe told Digital Spy, with a self-deprecating laugh. “But yeah, it’s like asking, ‘How do you feel about your teenage years?’ There’s so much in there that it’s almost impossible to single out one feeling.”
But though he admits it’s “hard to separate my relationship with Harry from my relationship with the films as a whole,” he did demonstrate that he has a mature perspective on it. “I’m incredibly grateful for the experience. It showed me what I want to do with the rest of my life. To find out early on what you love is really lucky.”
Celebrities: They’re just like us! Which is to say they also can only look at their past selves through their fingers. Meanwhile, Radcliffe has eked out a pretty unpredictable career for someone who shot to superstardom at such a young age, and who will forever be associated with a franchise he started shooting as a tween. Not every child star goes on to play a talking, farting corpse or gets to do a TV show where he and Steve Buscemi jump through time, and not every Simpsons super fan gets to do the show not once but twice.
(Via Digital Spy and ComicBook.com)