Daniel Radcliffe on His Harry Potter Souvenir, His How to Succeed Goal and the Show He'd Like to See Once a Week

In preparation for the July 15 premiere of Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows, Part 2, Broadway star Daniel Radcliffe posed for the cover of Time Out New York and gave the magazine a revealing interview.

The 22-year-old leading man of How to Succeed in Business Without Really Trying confessed that before performing “Brotherhood of Man” at the 2011 Tony Awards, “I had not been that nervous in years....There’s that moment when you’re all standing behind this huge LED screen, and suddenly you’re revealed like prizes on a game show, and Al Pacino is ten feet from you, and Mark Rylance and Bobby Cannavale and Sutton Foster and all these huge people…it’s fucking terrifying. But it was a huge thrill to perform there.”

Asked about backstage life at the Al Hirschfeld Theatre, Radcliffe said that the How to Succeed cast treats him like any other co-worker: “We did the reading at the end of 2009, and so they knew me, and they knew I wasn’t an asshole.” He went on to reveal a lofty goal for his Broadway run: “John [Larroquette's] and [my] ambition for this year is for neither of us to miss a show. We’ll be very pleased if we can achieve that. If you’re working as hard as you possibly can, then everyone else works that hard, too.”

As talk turned to Harry Potter, Radcliffe declared himself “delighted” with the eighth and final film. He kept only two small souvenirs, his character's glasses, “one without lenses and one with. [One is] a pair from the first film, which is kind of cool because my head was tiny then. I didn’t want anything else.”

In spite of spending so much of his time in the theater district, Radcliffe chose a Broadway outing as part of a hypothetical ideal NYC weekend: “Part of the perfect weekend would also include seeing The Book of Mormon,” he said. “I would quite happily see it again once a week for the rest of my life if I could. It’s one of the funniest, cleverest, most heartfelt things I’ve ever watched.”