When Daniel Radcliffe hosted “Saturday Night Life” in January, the obligatory Hogwarts sketch had him as a 28-year-old Harry Potter who, skulking around the school, reveals that he has been unable to move on from his Voldemort-conquering days. Equally unable to leave the past, Hermione Granger and Ron Weasley (played by SNL regulars) had become teachers, “So it’s not weird,” said Hermione. Harry observed to a group of incoming students that school gives you “the best days of your life,” but ironically told Draco Malfoy, now a “boring” visiting parent, that “you can’t keep living in the past.”
There was a salutary warning in the sketch for Radcliffe, Emma Watson, and Rupert Grint, three stars in their early twenties whose glory days may be behind them. As if to refute that, however, the Hammer company’s “The Woman in Black,” starring Radcliffe as a widowed lawyer hired to handle the affairs of an estate in a haunted English village, has just become Britain’s most successful horror movie of the last twenty years (possibly ever). It has earned £14.6 million ($23.15 million) in its first three weeks of release in the UK and $50.1 million in the US in 26 days, which if not spectacular is excellent for a British import.
Indebted to Hammer’s horror legacy, 1961’s “The Innocents,” adapted from Henry James’s “The Turn of the Screw,” and 1973’s “The Wicker Man,” “The Woman in Black” is traditional Gothic fare. Casting the erstwhile Potter as a grieving interloper pitted against a vengeful female ghost made perfect sense, facilitating as it did Radcliffe’s trademark intensity and worried look. Without impressing Ben Brantley of The New York Times, Radcliffe also just came off a successful run as the singing, dancing corporate climber J. Pierrepont Finch in the Broadway revival of “How to Succeed in Business Without Really Trying.”
During a 2007 production hiatus in the Potter series, Radcliffe appeared in the Australian bomb “December Boys” and in the British TV movie “My Boy Jack,” in which he was self-destructively stoical as the son of Rudyard Kipling, sacrificed on the Western Front by his father’s jingoism in 1915. He will next play Allen Ginsberg in “Kill Your Darlings,” John Krokidas’s New York indie about the poet’s arrival in New York and the 1944 manslaughter of David Kammerer by Beat friend Lucien Carr, whom Kammerer had stalked.
Krokidas has apparently asked Radcliffe not to shave his pubic hair before filming, indicating that the ghost of Harry Potter will be firmly laid to rest (along with James Franco’s Ginsberg from “Howl”). Playing Ginsberg should test Radcliffe in other ways, revealing the extent of his range. Hollywood leading man status may be far off but there’s no indication from Radcliffe that he aspires to it. As he told the BBC last year, “I”ve had success in films and all that, you know, but the challenge is now the longevity of it and that’s what I am pursuing.”
The news this week that Emma Watson is to topline Sofia Coppola’s next film “Bling Ring” should meanwhile confound some die-hard fans of Hermione Granger. Watson will in all probability play Alexis Neiers, the “Pretty Wild” reality star who served 30 days of a six-month sentence for her part in the burglaries of movie stars’ Hollywood homes in 2008-09. Neiers and her mostly teen accomplices stole an estimated $3 million-worth of jewelry and designer clothing from the likes of Paris Hilton, Lindsay Lohan, Orlando Bloom, and Rachel Bilson.
Coppola’s movie, pregnant with possibilities for psychological inquiry and the exploration of issues like star envy and social inferiority, is a rich opportunity for Watson. There are reserves of anger and defensiveness in her unsmiling screen persona as she showed as Hermione. The handsomely made children’s “Ballet Shoes” (2007), her sole inter-Harry Potter film, allowed her to be little more than a ladylike aspirant, but she was superbly bitter as the wardrobe assistant cruelly dumped by the Monroe-obsessed production gopher in “My Week with Marilyn.”
Since then Watson has acted in the “Catcher in the Rye”-influenced high-school movie “The Perks of Being a Wallflower” and has been cast in Potter director David Yates’s “Your Voice in My Head,” a low-budget psychological drama adapted by the writer Emma Forrest from her memoir, which recounted her self-destructive behavior. Watson is also attached to Guillermo del Toro’s “The Beauty and the Beast” redo (and has Oxford undergraduate studies to fit in). There are signs here of dramatic ambition and genuine stretching.
Rupert Grint made four films away from the Potter series: The ill-advised flatulence comedy “Thunderpants” (2002); the coming-of-age (with help of a superannuated diva) comedy-drama “Driving Lessons” (2006); the Irish teens-on-a-spree drama “Cherrybomb” (2008); and “Wild Target” (2010), a comedy in which he played hitman Bill Nighy’s assistant. They all failed, though Grint got respectable reviews for “Driving Lessons” and “Cherrybomb.”
Grint is homelier than Radcliffe and fellow Potter alumni Tom Felton (who played Malfoy) and, for God sakes, Robert Pattinson (Diggory), and a ginger nut to boot. (Not that that stopped my middle-school-age daughter and her friends bombarding him with fan mail when it was learned his family home is a few miles from where we’d be staying during the holidays.) However, his blokeish appeal, which manifested itself in Ron’s copious “bloodys,” should stand him in good stead as a character lead and one would bet on him eventually becoming a top British TV star.
In the immediate future, he has a plum part as a British RAF gunner in the Norwegian anti-war drama “Into the White,” directed by Peter Naess for Zentropa. Set in 1940, it’s based on a true story about a Luftwaffe plane brought down by a British fighter that was forced to crash-land. The three German and two British survivors were forced to winter together in the same Grotli hunting cabin where they had to overcome their nationalist antagonisms.
Grint will also star in “Cross Country,” which on paper sounds like a conventional twentysomethings-in-the-woods horror story, and, more intriguing, “Eddie the Eagle.” In this he’ll play Eddie Edwards, the British skier whose disastrous performance at the 1988 Calgary Winter Olympics led to him becoming a British folk hero. In the UK, of course, over-achievement is vulgar – so the Harry Potter trio should watch their steps.
Below: Rupert Grint in "Into the White"