After Harry Potter, he could have chased stardom. Instead, as he demonstrates again in ‘The Lost City,’ he’d rather get weird

Welcome to Misleading Men, a regular feature where we look back at the actors who ruled Hollywood for one brief shining moment.

Eleven years ago, the Harry Potter franchise came to an end. It was an incredible run — eight hit films over the span of a decade, grossing a combined $7.7 billion worldwide — and what was even more amazing, and rarely gets discussed, is that this string of blockbusters was put on the shoulders of children. You could argue that anybody could have been cast as Harry, Ron and ​​Hermione and the films would have still done well. (After all, the books were sensations, right?) But that’s ridiculous: Recall for a moment how much Star Wars fans disliked Jake Lloyd in The Phantom Menace, which is all the proof you need that it’s incredibly hard to ask young actors to carry the dramatic and emotional burden of such an expensive, potentially lucrative enterprise.

Just look how young Daniel Radcliffe, Rupert Grint and Emma Watson were at the premiere of the first installment, 2001’s Harry Potter and the Sorcerer’s Stone:

Warner Bros. took an enormous gamble that these kids would have the chops to play these characters — and that, for instance, they wouldn’t decide halfway through the series that they wanted to quit acting. Radcliffe was 11 when he was chosen for Harry Potter — imagine having something so monumental put on you at that young an age. No matter what your feelings are about these movies — I think they’re astoundingly alright and nothing more — it’s impressive that these tweens developed into compelling performers and became the face of the franchise, earning the love of so many readers who accepted them as the big-screen representation of extraordinarily popular characters. That couldn’t have been easy, but Radcliffe and his co-stars pulled it off.

Source: melmagazine.com