Daniel Radcliffe is already known as the face of the character Harry Potter, but what many don’t know is that another actor almost played the wizard.
More than 20 years ago, we saw the actor for the first time Daniel Radcliffe bringing to life the most famous wizard in pop culture in “Harry Potter and the Philosopher’s Stone”. But, what many don’t know, is that he wasn’t the studio’s first choice to play the protagonist!
According to an interview with the casting director Janet Hirshenson According to HuffPost, the film already had another professional working in the position for a year before she joined the Warner Bros. Pictures team. The actors who would play other characters, such as Ron and Hermione, had already been duly chosen, while Harry’s role was still open.
Like all the other main actors, the production team needed Harry’s actor to be British, to make this part of the adaptation as faithful as possible to the books. During the interview, Janet revealed that the only American who auditioned for the role was Liam Aikenwho had already worked with the director Chris Columbus and who would later star in the classic “A Series of Unfortunate Events”.
In another of his speeches, Janet revealed that the actor Jamie Bellknown for starring in the iconic Billy Elliot, was also considered for the role of the wizard. However, he was not chosen due to his age:
I know there was some pressure at one point on the actor who played Billy Elliot (Jamie Bell). He was a very good actor, but he was 14 years old (…) And to complicate matters, I needed a boy with blue or green eyes because Harry’s defining feature is his green or blue-green eyes.”
After the incident, the search for the perfect Harry Potter continued, which led the director Chris Columbus to meet Daniel Radcliffe through his father in a theater, a moment that determined the future of the film franchise:
“One night, David Heyman, the producer, came to the theater and met Daniel’s father, who was an agent… so the producer met Daniel and his father and said to Daniel, ‘Why don’t you come in and audition? Think about it.’ So he said, ‘OK.”
Source: Recreio
