Daniel Radcliffe answered some questions in an interview with Playboy for its November issue. Much of the conversation was about Harry Potter of course, but the subject of Radcliffe’s heavy drinking between the ages of 18 and 20 eventually came up.
Asked if the drinking was a reaction to public scrutiny, Radcliffe had this to say:
Anytime I’d go out to dance, camera phones would come out. That would make me very self-conscious, and what’s the easiest way to escape being self-conscious? Alcohol is a quick way of doing that. So it was related in that way. A few years ago there was a TV ad that showed a lot of inventors, including a guy who invented the camera phone. He was smiling smugly into the camera, and I was just like, Fuck you. What have you wrought? [laughs] Camera phones are definitely not my favorite.
Philippe Kahn, by the way, is credited as the person who invented the camera phone. We can’t say for sure this is the person Radcliffe was referring to, and besides, it’s likely that he was mostly joking.
In response to a follow-up question, Radcliffe said:
It becomes painful to watch your personal issues that you’ve tried to be sincere about get turned into fodder for TV gossip shows. I was forthright about it, as you said, but once you start talking about this, that’s all you talk about. I can say lots of well-meaning stuff—why it happened and how I stopped—for three hours, and the headline would be DRUNK ON THE SET OF HARRY POTTER. So I don’t talk about it as much now.
Finally, the conversation turned to Radcliffe’s new movie Victor Frankenstein. In the film, he plays the character of Igor, Dr. Frankenstein’s assistant. The film opens in the U.S. on November 25.
Radcliffe has a number of other films in various stages of production. Swiss Army Man and Now You See Me 2 are in post, while Imperium is filming and Young Americans is in pre-production. This is all according to IMDb.