Daniel Radcliffe Would Like You to Stop Asking Him About Rap, Please

Daniel Radcliffe has made it clear his Harry Potter days are in the past, but his quidditch skills have come surprisingly in handy in his new role as an American drug mule, who spends almost all of his time in Jesper Ganslandt’s new film, Beast of Burden, hidden away inside a cockpit, on a mission to deliver cocaine across the U.S.-Mexico border to save his wife, played by Grace Gummer.
Instead of perching on a broomstick atop a pole in front of green screen and a wind machine, though, this time, Radcliffe, now 28, simply holed up in a fake cockpit in Savannah, Georgia—a much more comfortable experience, even if he was stuck in there for eight days straight. Safely back home in London, ahead of the film’s release next Friday, he talked everything from shooting with Ganslandt to systemic sexism to the 2014 rap session that’s still haunting him in his culture diet.
Drug smuggling is a pretty bold subject. What drew you to this role?
I guess I didn’t think of it as being a movie about drug smuggling—it kind of seemed incidental to me. It was more this kind of fun, very straight line story, literally about taking a guy from A to B and seeing how much awfulness we can throw at him in between. And I did a bit of research into the interesting way Jesper Ganslandt, the director, works, which seemed like it’d continue with this one, since I’m in the plane for so long, and it did. I had earpieces in and he was directing me live, saying, like, This person’s calling, and now this person’s calling, and now we’re going back to that one… We ended up doing huge chunks of scenes at one time, like half-hour long takes. It was the most like doing a play I’ve ever done on camera, just because you were able to go for so long and cover so much of the story in one hit. I really loved working with him. And I’m definitely an expert in fake-flying a plane now.
Do you have any experience with actually flying a plane? Did you try to study up?
I did—I took two lessons, just so that I had some sense of what it was like and how much you needed to move things to make things happen, so I wasn’t looking like I was trying to race a go-kart when I was trying to fly a plane. So, yes: I flew a plane for 15 minutes. My first lesson, they just gave me the controls, and it was terrifying. It did not feel like a thing that should have happened.
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