Daniel Radcliffe is clear on this: 'I was not w*nking during the filming of Harry Potter'

'I managed to restrain myself until I got home'

Daniel Radcliffe’s enlightening new interview with NME took an odd segue, when the actor got into a debate about the level of masturbation on the Harry Potter set.

Here’s the excerpt verbatim, because you don’t want to be misquoted on this kind of thing.

“What?” [Radcliffe] says, confused, but not angry. “I didn’t say I w*nked on set!”

He gets out his phone to find the interview, which doesn’t take long as there are many, many Google hits. “Oh God,” he says, flopping back in his seat.

“It’s frustrating when you tell a story and say, ‘Yes, I w*nked a lot when I was a teenager,’ but clearly I didn’t mean on set.” He straightens up in his seat. “Can you make this clear for me: I was not w*nking during the filming of Potter - I managed to restrain myself until I got home.”

Elsewhere in the interview, Radcliffe talked about the more serious aspects of filming Potter for most of his teenage years and its effect on his career.

"I had a huge amount to prove,” he said. “Proving that you can be a young actor and not be a complete f*cking disaster when you grow up. That is the – quite unfair I think – image that people have of young actors.

“There are a huge number of child actors who grow up fine. Always with my career in film, I saw Potter as an amazing beginning to it. I’m sure I’ll never hit that kind of commercial peak again but very, very few people will.”

He added of his recent projects, which include a Mikhail Bulgakov adaptation for Sky Arts and Allen Ginsberg biopic Kill Your Darlings: "People do ask me, ‘Why do you choose such weird movies?’ but I don’t think they’re weird, they’re just stories I’m interested in,

"Isn’t having weird tastes good, though? I think so. I think that’s better than always wanting to play the handsome hero."

(H/T Kimberley Dadds)