Daniel Radcliffe said the late Alan Rickman initially ‘intimidated’ him on Harry Potter (Picture: Murray Close)
Harry Potter star Daniel Radcliffe has admitted he was ‘terrified’ by one of his co-stars on the set of the JK Rowling adaptation.
The Swiss Army Man actor believed the late Alan Rickman, who played Severus Snape, ‘hated’ him while filming the Hogwarts films.
However, Daniel said eventually Rickman saw that he ‘really wanted to work’ at acting and was supportive of his post-Harry Potter career.
The 34-year-old made the comments after he was played a 2016 interview with Rickman in which he sang Daniel’s praises and said he felt ‘huge pride’ over his role in Broadway musical, How to Succeed in Business Without Really Trying.
Stating he had never seen the clip before, Daniel told Josh Horowitz on the Happy Sad Confused podcast: ‘I was so intimidated by Alan Rickman. How can you not be by that voice? Even hearing that voice you forget quite how low it was until it echoes through you.
‘I was so intimidated by him for the first three movies. I was terrified by him and was like, “This guy hates me.”
Daniel said he believed Rickman ‘hated’ him when they began filming Harry Potter (Picture: Dave Allocca/Starpix/REX/Shutterstock)
However, he later won Rickman’s respect for his dedication to the craft (Picture: Warner Bros)
‘Somewhere along the lines he saw that I really wanted to do this and work at it.’
After Harry Potter, The Lost City actor said Rickman showed a huge interest in his work and came to every one of his stage productions – even cutting a holiday short to watch him in West End show Equus.
Daniel added: ‘He would take me out afterwards and we would talk about it. He was one of the first people to say like, “You should look at voice coaching and investigate all this stuff.”
‘I am so lucky. To hear him say that is really lovely. Thank you for showing me that.’
Daniel played the titular character while Rickman portrayed Snape (Picture: Warner Bros)
Daniel said Rickman was hugely supportive of his career post- Harry Potter (Picture: AP)
In the 2016 interview, Rickman said about the Harry Potter child stars: ‘As much as I was doing it for seven weeks, they were doing it for 52 weeks. This was their life from 12 to 22. And you would watch it from the sidelines at times and throw the odd lifeline in because there was so little time for that.
‘It’s only in recent years that I’ve managed to sit down in a cafe with Daniel in New York. He was at a theater and I was at another. Huge pride to go to see him in the musical [‘How to Succeed in Business Without Really Trying’]. How dare he be dancing as well as the New York dancers. He worked at it.’
Before Rickman’s death from pancreatic cancer in January 2016 aged 69, Daniel revealed he was quite the prankster on set.
Radcliffe also previously revealed Rickman was a prankster on Harry Potter (Picture: Getty Images)
In 2014, he told Reddit that Rickman had placed a fart machine inside a sleeping bag used for a scene for The Prisoner of Azkaban and then set it off during filming.
Rickman had pulled the prank to embarrass Daniel in front of his teenage crush, an actress in the sleeping bag next to him.
Several months after Rickman’s death, Daniel spoke to Metro.co.uk about his favourite memory of his former co-star.
He said: ‘My favourite night I ever spent with Alan was a night after [his West End play] Equus in London.
‘I went out with Alan and Rima [Horton], Richard Griffith and Heather [Gibson] which is now a very bizarre thing because both men have passed away.’
He explained: ‘I’d always been quite intimidated by Alan, who I loved and who was always very generous with me, but I was still kind of scared of him.
‘Suddenly I was out to dinner with him and I was watching him be funny, self-deprecating and vulnerable. It was lovely.’
Daniel added: ‘I like to talk about those moments of Alan as a human being because everyone knows what a great actor he was. They don’t need me to tell them.
‘Alan was a great deal more fun than the scary people he’s known for [playing].’
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