Daniel Radcliffe has previously been very open about his struggle with alcoholism and in a new interview he admits that the immense Harry Potter fame definitely played a role in his addiction issues.
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“The quickest way to forget about the fact that you were being watched was to get very drunk,” Radcliffe said on an episode of Off Camera with Sam Jones. “Then as you get very drunk, you become aware, ‘Oh, people are watching more now because now I’m getting very drunk, so I should probably drink more to ignore that more.’“
“It can affect your psyche. Part of the thing is the expectation that you should just be delighted all the time,” Radcliffe added. “You have a great job, you’re wealthy, you don’t have a right to not be excited about the thing all the time. I think that’s a pressure as well. You suddenly start to feel, ‘Man, if I am just feeling some human emotion of sadness, does that mean I’m doing this wrong? Am I not good at being famous?’“
Radcliffe also said that he felt like “actors have to be crazy cool drunks.”
“I had to live up to this weird image that I had in my head of what it means to be a famous actor.”
He admits that breaking the habit “took a few years and it took a couple of attempts.”
“I have been unbelievably lucky with the people I had around me at certain times in my life. I met some really key people, some actors some of them not, who just gave me great advice and really cared for me,” Radcliffe recalled.
“Ultimately it was just my own decision. I woke up one morning after a night, going, ‘This is probably not good.’“
The actor announced his sobriety in 2012 and once referred to himself as “a really annoying, loud, inappropriate, messy drunk” in a 2014 interview.
Despite the stress that comes with being in the public eye, he goes on to say that he’s still totally in love with the job.
“[I] love the work and that’s the thing I always will go back to,” Radcliffe said.
“Even at the lowest point, I still loved my job so much and I still loved going to set,” he continued. “There was never a day where my own shit would affect how I was on the set. There was never a point where I was like, ‘Oh, I wish this hadn’t happened to me. I wish I wasn’t Harry Potter.’ That just didn’t happen.
Radcliffe currently stars as god’s assistant angel in comedy series Miracle Workers, now streaming exclusively on Stan.
