One Nightstand With Daniel Radcliffe

In One Nightstand, celebrity readers and writers join us at The Blond in 11 Howard to discuss some of their favorite books, allowing us to learn about their tastes and lives in the process.

Most people get their book recommendations online or from friends, but for 14-year-old Daniel Radcliffe, they came from music. “There's actually a song by an Irish band called The Divine Comedy. They made a song called ‘The Booklovers,’ to which I attribute a lot of what I've read,” says the actor, now 36. “It's a list of authors set to music. And after every author, there's a weird soundbite. It might be a quote, it might be a noise... As a teenager, I was like, ‘Ooh, I want to figure out what the sounds mean to the author.’ So it became my reading list.” The list is composed of 71 authors ranging from Charles Dickens and George Eliot to A.S. Byatt and Kingsley Amis. “I still have not completed it,” Radcliffe adds, “[but] it's definitely made me read things I probably wouldn't have otherwise.”

Radcliffe’s love of reading began in an ordinary fashion, though his relationship to his first love admittedly went in a different direction from most. “I think I was definitely one of the kids that Harry Potter got them into reading,” he says of J.K. Rowling’s franchise, in which he played the titular role over eight films and 10+ years. “I had read the first two before we started filming. And then after I got the job, I was like, ‘I guess I need to read all of these now.’ And I got into them, and they were great.” Nevertheless, being Harry Potter didn’t come with the perks of early access to unreleased manuscripts like one might imagine.

“I remember in the movie The Devil Wears Prada, there's a subplot that is like she has to find a version of Harry Potter before publishing,” he says. “I remember we all saw that and we were like, ‘Good luck.’ I think famously Alan Rickman was the only person from the cast who was told anything in advance. And certainly we didn't get anything.”

Radcliffe continued to foster his reading habit during his work on set. “I dropped out of school when I was 17,” he says. “Emma carried on and did her A levels. So what that meant was that there were still at least three hours of tuition stuff a week, because Emma was still doing school. So in the year after I had left school, but while Emma was still doing it, I basically got Warner Brothers to pay for my old English teacher to come in for three hours a week just to talk books with no pressure of exams.”

Radcliffe wrapped up his work as Harry Potter when he was 21, and since then his career choices have been rich and varied. There have been carefully selected film projects — he played a young lawyer in the gothic-horror The Woman in Black (2012) and Allen Ginsberg in Kill Your Darlings (2013) — though he has come alive in his work on the stage. He made his Broadway and West End debut in Equus as a 17-year-old, while his 2023 performance opposite Jonathan Groff and Lindsay Mendez in Stephen Sondheim's Merrily We Roll Along earned him a Tony Award.

He returns to Broadway this spring in Every Brilliant Thing, a one-man show which begins with a 7-year-old boy reckoning with his mother’s suicide attempt. The audience plays witness to the next 20 years of his life, through love, separation, grief, and his own mental health struggles, with many attendees drawn in to participate driving the narrative forward.

“There's a lot about this play that comes very naturally to me,” he says. “The character itself is something that sometimes you just read something and you go like, "Oh, this just sits in my voice really naturally. I sound like I could be this person and in terms of how he talks about using humor to avoid talking about how you're feeling, or the way he talks about music. There's a lot I have in common with him. But then there's this huge other part of the play which is so out of my comfort zone in terms of the improvisation and the audience participation. There's something thrilling about that.”

He continues: “Normally when you're doing a play, the time, the period we're in right now — in previews — you're still terrified, you’re still nervous, but you have the prospect of like, ‘It will get normal. I'll be able to do this without feeling so stressed about it,’” he says. “I don't think I ever will with this play. I think it will be terrifying a little bit until the final performance, just because that half hour before the play while casting it is so frenetic every time.”

The play was co-written by the British playwright Duncan Macmillan and comedian Jonny Donahoe, and was previously staged by Phoebe Waller Bridge in a tent at a music festival. The British sensibility radiates through, particularly in Radcliffe’s performance. “I think there's almost a fear or a stigma around mental illness or mental health and depression that to talk about it is to risk being infected by it,” he says. “And so it's lovely to have a show that really does deal with all that very directly but manages to find a very life affirming, joyous way of doing all of it.”

The show itself sees the protagonist finally undertake therapy, a practice Radcliffe himself is supportive of, especially for child actors. “I think that's a great idea,” he says of Ariana Grande’s idea that therapy should be available on set for all young performers. “And in fact, when I've had some conversations with people that are working on the new Potter series, and I think that that is something that has been ... I don't know, I'm not involved, but I think that's something that they are thinking about this time around as well, which is great.”

Radcliffe is largely positive about his own experience as a child actor, though he hopes his infant son won’t follow in his footsteps. “I would love my child not to be what I do for many reasons, but one of them is that like, you avoid the nepo baby thing,” he says. “If you just become a tree surgeon, they'll just do something different, nobody's going to be comparing us.” That said, his son is aware of what his father does.

“The other day he saw me on TV for the first time in an ad for the TV show I'm doing and he just said with a tone that was like, ‘I'm not crazy, right?’ And he looked around and said, ‘Dada!’ to his mom. I was sort of like, ‘You know your job is sort of b*llsh*t when you can't explain it to a child.’ They understand firemen, they understand police, they understand doctors. When you're having to be like, ‘Well, we tell stories and you know the books you read well, it's like we help people tell stories like those books.’ So you're like, nobody can be an annoying, crazy *ssh*le while you're doing something like that.”

This is perhaps symptomatic of Radcliffe’s overall mindset: He appears to enjoy his work and his life, and feels lucky to do it. “When you do the most commercially successful thing you will ever do right at the beginning of your career, it frees you from the want to try to do the most commercially successful thing you're ever going to do,” he says. “So you're just like, right, let's just do stuff that's fun and either that's going to make people laugh and make people enjoy watching it or that has a message that is worth creating in some way.”

Keep reading to discover four of Radcliffe’s favorite books.

His first pick is The Song of Achilles by Madeline Miller. “The Iliad's always been one that I'm like, I probably won't read that in full, but reading this amazing interpretation of it you get what I'm assuming is the story, or a lot of it,” he says. “I'm somebody that if I start a book, I cannot not finish it, which can result in me reading things for a long time. I just got out of one of those books and then I read The Song of Achilles, and it was so nice just to not be able to wait to get back to a book again and just be reading it all the time. It's a beautiful story. It's beautifully written. It does like the most spectacular job of taking us to like the lowest point you could possibly be, near the end and everything just tying together.”

His second pick, The Surgeon of Crowthorne by Simon Winchester — also known as The Professor and the Madman in the U.S — tells the story of the creation of the Oxford English Dictionary. “The idea of making a book which had a definition for every word was such an insane, mammoth undertaking," he says. "They crowdsourced it — they put out an ad and said, ‘If you know a word is in Chaucer somewhere, find the reference and send it to us.’ And then at some point they noticed that a disproportionately high number of the entries they were receiving were from one address." This address belonged to an American, Dr. William Chester Minor, a psychiatric patient at Broadmoor Asylum in the UK.

“If anybody out there is looking for a book for their dad, for their birthday or Christmas, I very highly recommend this one,” he adds.

This third pick is How to Hide an Empire by Daniel Immerwahr. “It's incredibly educational about America's history generally, but particularly this little time in American history, which was kind of fascinating because the way you behaved like a global power at the time was to have an empire, but it kind of goes against everything America was founded on to have an empire,” he says.

The book delves into the history of Puerto Rico and its place within the union, a topic fresh in his mind after he attended the Super Bowl as part of his promotion circuit for his new NBC comedy, The Fall and Rise of Reggie Dinkins, opposite Tracy Morgan. “It was awesome,” he says. “But hearing anybody complain about Bad Bunny not being American or any of that stuff, now having read it... I mean, hearing them complain about it anyways is heinous. But after having read that book, you're like, ‘No, you guys need to shut up.’ You get very defensive.”

British by birth, Radcliffe hopes to become an American citizen when he is eligible. “I wanted to get a green card because my son is American and I'm going to need to be able to be here whenever I need to be here, but it's a weirdly impotent feeling not being able to get involved,” he says of being unable to vote.

His final pick is The Master and Margarita by Mikhail Bulgakov. Radcliffe first read the book as a teenager — the book’s locations formed part of the itinerary when he later visited Moscow for his 21st birthday — and he says he still thinks about it constantly. "I always say I am not a religious person — this book makes me wish that I was," he says. “It does things that it's insane a book can do. It's so beautiful, so funny, so exciting. There's a six-foot-tall cat called Behemoth who has a pistol and a drinking solution. He's constantly drinking vodka.”

He adds: “I saw someone the other day called Gabriel Garcia Marquez the ‘father of magical realism,’” he says. “Look, I'm not trying to take anything away from Gabriel Garcia Marquez, but I do think that this book, if you're going to find a starting point, is so wonderful.”

Watch the full episode below: