Daniel Radcliffe has been busily promoting Horns all over London. The movie adapts Joe Hill’s fantasy horror novel. If you haven’t read any of Hill’s work, just know that he’s Stephen King’s son. I think Hill is actually a more effective writer than his father, but Horns is the least impressive Hill book out there. In this movie, Daniel plays a young man (Iggy Perrish) who sprouts horns from his forehead after the mysterious death of his girlfriend. People suspect Iggy of murder, and he (warning: graphic) transforms into hellspawn. He’s not a villain, but I can’t explain without spoilers.

Dan crushed an AP interview, in which he admitted feeling perplexed at being called “an unconventional romantic lead.” The journo says people don’t think of Dan “that way” because they associate him with young Harry Potter. Daniel’s conclusion: “Well, the male population has had no problem sexualizing Emma Watson immediately.” Bam.

Oh, and Dan did a Reddit AMA yesterday. He’s delightful. Some highlights:

His dream castmates: “George Clooney … Jennifer Lawrence… I just think they’d be really cool, Paul Rudd, I met him and was like ‘You’re awesome!’ I just want to work with people you can get on with, and you have a good rapport with, and those are definitely some of them. Also directors more than actors, whom I think ‘I want to work with them.’ So you know, people like the Coen Brothers, or Wes Anderson, Paul Thomas Anderson, Christopher Nolan, again, it’s directors i suppose I get more excited about than actors.”

If he could use his fame to change something: “I would remove the bullsh-t hierarchy from the film industry, because there are certain people who do my job, and also directors and producers, who seem to think the job they do gives them license to treat people who work for them badly, and there is no good reason for that, and it should not be tolerated. I know that if I ever get to direct, it will not be present anywhere on my set.”

Weird autograph moments: “Um… well, recently a couple of people have asked me to sign a piece of paper so they can then get it tattooed. And, you know, that’s pretty weird. Just because I have pretty horrible handwriting – that AMA sign was me printing, but you should see my cursive, it’s not pretty! So yeah, I would advise people against doing that. I have signed a picture of Elijah Wood – and I think we’ve also both said in interviews that we would like each other to play each other in films of our lives – but I was on a red carpet in Japan, and this Japanese man gave me a picture of Elijah, and I knew i wasn’t going to get past the language barrier to explain, so I wrote ‘I am not Elijah Wood, signed Daniel Radcliffe.'”

Alan Rickman pranked him: “There’s – in the 3rd [Potter] film – there’s a shot in the great hall of all the kids sleeping in the great hall, and the camera starts very very wide, and comes in so that it’s an inch from my face, a very long developing set, yeah, and Alan Rickman decided he would plant one of those fart machines in my, uh, sleeping bag, and they waited until like -the camera had come in for this huge DRAMATIC developing shot, and then unleashed this tremendous noise in the great hall. I immediately thought: ‘This is one of the other kids f—ing around, and we were going to get in trouble.’ But as it turns out, it was one of the members of Britain’s acting royalty. I think I laughed a lot, was probably a bit embarrassed, but it was really really funny.”

He’ll never disown Harry Potter: “It feels wonderful, honestly, to have people still come up to you and say you were such a huge part of my childhood. It’s genuinely lovely. I am very lucky to be famous for something so many people loved. And there’s… yeah, I always like to say that I think some people think that because I’m making an effort to have a career for myself after Potter, that they somehow think I want to escape Potter? And I don’t, I’m very proud of what those films were, and what we did with them. And so I always like to say I am happy to hear from people who still love the movies.I remember when I met, once, a guy who’d been in a punk band in the 70’s, and then he wouldn’t talk about this punk days at all to me when I was asking, he sort of didn’t want anything to do with it? And I remember being really disappointed by that, and thinking of how uncool it was for him to disown the thing that made him, and I just would never do that.”

[From Reddit]

Thank you, Daniel Radcliffe. I keep reading interviews where actors trash-talk their early work. Most of them get away with that, but Dan’s right to call it a douchey, uncool (and not very punk) attitude to adopt. An endless stream of struggling actors would kill for any acting role, and then some A- or B-lister decides that he’s got nothing better to talk about but how embarrassing those roles were. It’s rude and classless. These guys (and gals) should be grateful for stepping-stone roles, but actors can act spoiled. Not DanRad.

Here’s a video of the AP interview.

Photos courtesy of WENN