When Daniel Radcliffe was growing up on movie sets, playing Harry Potter in eight films that spanned his entire adolescence, he wasn’t going back to his room at the end of the day to watch “big, worthy, epic movies,” he admits.
“I was watching a lot of half-hour comedies.”
In that way, he was like many teenagers, developing his sense of humor by watching the people he found funny. For the London-born Radcliffe, it was a lot of his countrymates: Steve Coogan as Alan Partridge, Chris Morris’ Brass Eye and something I’d never heard of called Yes, Minister, an ’80s comedy co-written by Clue and My Cousin Vinny filmmaker Jonathan Lynn, which Radcliffe describes as “like if Veep had no swearing.”
Radcliffe’s love of comedy, which eventually led to comedic roles on Broadway (How to Succeed in Business Without Really Trying) and television (Miracle Workers; the criminally underrated Weird Al biopic, Weird) and now to The Fall and Rise of Reggie Dinkins, the Peacock sitcom that — hallelujah! — has recently been renewed for a second season. Starring Tracy Morgan as the titular washed-up football star, the show from 30 Rock veterans Robert Carlock and Sam Means casts Radcliffe, 36, as pretentious documentarian Arthur Tobin, who’s experienced his own Hollywood flameout and is seeking redemption by making a film about Reggie.
As Radcliffe puts it, after working with Carlock and Means on the Unbreakable Kimmy Schmidt movie released in 2020, he was basically waiting for them to write him — and specifically his English accent — into something else.
“I think Sam and Robert are both mild Anglophiles,” Radcliffe tells me. “They both love England, but also English comedy and making jokes about English people. I’m obviously a good vessel for any of those jokes.”
In our conversation, Radcliffe talks about how he managed to fit seamlessly into the show’s ensemble, which includes Morgan’s fellow Saturday Night Live alum Bobby Moynihan and sitcom veteran Erika Alexander (Living Single), and how hosting SNL back in 2012 wasn’t actually good preparation for any of it. We also talk about how he’s balancing his work on Broadway with raising a kid and now being a sitcom star, and the part of Reggie Dinkins he’d really like to stop getting credit for.
Hear all of it in today’s episode, which also includes a dispatch from me and Premiere Party’s Richard Lawson at the Cannes Film Festival, where we talk about the mixed response to many of the biggest titles, the undisputed breakout hit Club Kid and what I’ve learned from attending Cannes for the first time. Much more from Cannes coming up in Thursday’s newsletter and in Prestige Junkie After Party — join us there!
