Daniel Radcliffe recently popped to the SXSW Festival in Austin, Texas for the premiere of The Lost City, in which he plays the eccentric billionaire villain that Sandra Bullock and Channing Tatum must defeat. And Radcliffe continues his long run of post-Potter eccentric roles by playing Weird Al Yankovic in the upcoming movie about the comedian and musician.
ET Canada spoke to Radcliffe while he was at the festival about Weird: The Al Yankovic Story, which can be loosely described as a biopic. “I grew the moustache, the moustache was mine because I didn’t want to wear a fake one every day,” Radcliffe said. Evan Rachel Wood, who plays Madonna, had “much more of an involved process” in getting her look right, he continued. “We had an amazing hair and makeup team truly. I don’t know how they did what they did in 18 days. It was all down to them.”
Radcliffe promises that the film will be; “the absolutely 100 per cent true story of Al’s life. I’m gonna keep that going for as long as I can, because it’s insane. It’s going to be a lot of fun hopefully.”
Even while still playing the boy wizard in the hugely successful Harry Potter franchise, Radcliffe made left-field career choices that were far more interesting than one might expect from a young man who was raking in millions.
In 2007, while still aged 17, Radcliffe appeared naked on stage in a production of Equus, as a character with a sexual attraction to horses. Radcliffe also starred in Gothic horror The Woman in Black, as poet Allen Ginsberg in Kill Your Darlings and as a young man who sprouts Devil-like horns from his head in Horns – all in 2012-2013.
Weirdest of all was Radcliffe’s role as a flatulent corpse in Swiss Army Man, co-starring Paul Dano. And then there was Guns Akimbo, in which he plays someone who wakes up to find a gun bolted to each of his hands. Much like Elijah Wood, who could have rested on his laurels after playing Frodo, Radcliffe has chosen an idiosyncratic and unpredictable career path.
We hope that Radcliffe will get to stretch his musical muscles in Weird: The Al Yankovic Story, but we know that he’ll definitely be bringing his gifts for comedy.