Harry Potter actor Daniel Radcliffe reveals what happens when he reveals to fans that he's over the age of 30. The wildly popular Wizarding World was introduced to fans globally when the first Harry Potter book was published in the late '90s (summer 1997 in the UK and the next year in the US) and became a more or less instant smash success. Since then, Harry Potter has spawned films, spin-offs (a third Fantastic Beasts movie is due in 2022), a website, a stage play sequel, and an army of lifelong fans.
Daniel Radcliffe's first appearance in the title role was in 2001's Harry Potter and the Sorcerer's Stone, when he was just 11 years old. He played Harry for a full decade, through all seven years at Hogwarts, until 2011's Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows Part 2. For people who read the books and watched the movies as children, Harry Potter and Daniel Radcliffe quite literally grew up with them.
Unfortunately for those fans, they're not kids anymore, and Radcliffe is here to remind them, however unintentionally. In a video for Wired, Radcliffe revealed what happens when people learn he just turned 32. He says "they go sort of pale," comparing it to the scene on the beach at the end of Inception. Read the full quote here:
"I recently turned 32. When I tell people that I am 30, people, they go sort of pale. They look like Inception at the beach at the end when they’ve aged a thousand years. Just like that."
Since filming the Harry Potter movies, Daniel Radcliffe has been working continuously, but the roles he takes are generally in smaller, more cult-oriented projects that haven't quite hit the mainstream like his TBS series Miracle Workers. The projects he's chosen are certainly interesting, like the film Swiss Army Man where he plays a farting corpse, but they haven't necessarily reached a wide audience. Indeed, his most mainstream effort was the film that immediately followed his tenure as Harry Potter, the haunted house horror flick The Woman in Black, in which he plays a lawyer with a young son. The idea of Harry Potter having children was roundly rejected by many fans who still saw him as the boy wizard.
As a result, Harry Potter still looms large over Radcliffe's reputation. This would certainly account for the way his age still strikes fans like a bucket of cold water, reminding them that time has indeed been ticking on for the ten years that Harry Potter has been offscreen. If there's a silver lining to this, it's that Radcliffe fans who have had him off their radar for a long time now have a lot of interesting material with which they can reacquaint themselves with the now adult actor, whose talent and versatility extend far beyond the Potterverse.
Source: Wired