HomeENTERTAINMENT WEEKLY: Was it ever weird thinking about having all these people in the audience see you naked, your friends, your costars, your parents?
DANIEL RADCLIFFE: Having my parents see me [naked] was never a problem. They've always been completely supportive. They don't really care that I'm naked onstage, I don't think. But yeah, it was a lot.
How did you gauge if an audience was ''getting'' the show?
Onstage, you hear everything coming from the audience. And the moment you know you've got their attention is when all the coughing stops. Even more so when they keep trying to save their coughs to the end of a scene. You think, Ah, right, well they're obviously into it.
Some nights, especially when you'd done both a matinee and evening show the same day, I understand you weren't able to come out the stage-door entrance to sign autographs for fans. And there were a lot of fans outside that door each night.
[Appears stricken] I know. The thing about that is, some of those people are real, genuine fans who I do feel a bit gutted I can't go out and say hello to. [But if] I have done two shows that day, by that time I'm pretty exhausted. And the really annoying thing is the amount of autograph hunters out there who will instantly sell them. They make up a huge amount of the people that wait there. I can't stand them, 'cause they're so aggressive, and just foul-mouthed with everybody.
Is it hard to separate the fans from the signature-sellers when that stage door opens? What does that moment when you emerge feel like?
It is a bizarre thing. There's always a bit of a moment of mini-panic. It's like a premiere, but on a tiny scale. You go, All right. And suddenly everyone starts shouting and you have to get your pen out and start signing. [Laughs] You just sort of talk yourself through it to calm down a bit. I'm quite used to that sort of thing now, I suppose. But the autograph hunters are so rude to people that I actually try not to sign for them whenever I can. I did say to this one guy the other day, ''Look, I signed for you, it has to be, 20 times by now. I'm really sorry, I'm not doing it again. And they're always blank pieces of paper. They just go and sell them. And you think, Why would I bother with you when I can sign for somebody else? They haven't seen the show. They're just hanging around the stage door! I just don't think it's right.
Have you spoken to Jo Rowling lately?
I went out to dinner with her when she came and saw Equus. She loved it. I knew she was coming, and I did get a little bit nervous, actually. She wants us all to do really, really well for ourselves, in whatever ways we want to, and so I wanted to prove that I was doing well. So I was very nervous when Jo came in. But she loved it. Except, it was the one night that someone at the end threw a stuffed owl at the stage, a little cuddly Harry Potter toy owl at the stage. And I was like, Why, why? Why now? The one night that Jo is here! But there was actually a very sweet message [attached to the owl].
Did you feel nervous going from film, where you only need to be ''on'' for like a minute at a time, to stage, where a mood has to be sustained for a couple of hours, in real time?
There's been a real spate recently of a lot of actors from film doing stage work and actually not — I don't want to sound like I'm criticizing people, but not putting the work in. Thinking that they can walk from film to stage and have it work. It is a completely different discipline. They come unstuck, because they haven't done all the vocal stuff you really, really need, 'cause you can't do it otherwise. You'll either not be heard, or you will lose your voice.
You've got no plans to go on to university, at least not now. Why?
I think for a lot of people, university is about discovering what they want to do. I sort of know what I want to do. My two main goals now are to act and to keep writing. The whole time I was at university, I would be thinking, God, I could be working on something now.
