Daniel Radcliffe jokes about disappointing Harry Potter fans

Daniel Radcliffe is joking about disappointing Harry Potter fans: ‘You’re old now. What happened?’

Daniel Radcliffe as Harry Potter, giving a goblin a piggyback ride.

Oct. 31, 2023 2:49 PM PT

Yer a wizened ’arry!

It’s been more than a decade since Daniel Radcliffe hung up his cloak and wand, but fans still approach the man who began portraying their favorite wizard when he was just 11 years old. The actor stopped by “The Kelly Clarkson Show” Monday, along with his “Merrily We Roll Along” castmates Lindsay Mendez and Jonathan Groff, and the group joked about disappointing children by ruining the magic of cinema.

Clarkson began the show by congratulating Radcliffe, who welcomed his first baby boy in April, and asking Mendez, who has a 2-year-old, about their plans for Halloween. “As someone who dresses up for a living, it’s not, like, my favorite thing to put on a costume, but of course my daughter really wanted us to do ‘Frozen,’ so she’s Anna and I am going to be Elsa and my partner is going to be Kristoff,” Mendez told Clarkson, as she motioned to Groff who voiced Kristoff in Disney’s megahit “Frozen” films.

“She has no idea that Uncle Jonathan is Kristoff yet,” she said. “That’ll be mind-blowing when she figures that out.”

“She would lose it,” Clarkson said, noting that when her kids realized she voiced a character in 2019’s “UglyDolls,” it “broke the wall” for them, adding that ruining the movie magic was “kind of intensely sad.”

Naturally Radcliffe knows a thing or two about budding wizards and witches realizing he’s not actually the Voldemort-fighting Gryffindor he portrays on the big screen.

“I do that to kids on a regular basis when they’re like, ‘It’s Harry!’” the actor jested, adding that he usually just apologizes as a kid exclaims, “You’re old now. What happened?”

In 2021, Radcliffe appeared on “The Jonathan Ross Show” and admitted that even hearing the theme music from “Harry Potter” makes him cringe. “My heart dies a little bit every time I hear it as a ringtone . . . It’s like passing around baby photos of yourself. It’s not really an enjoyable experience.”

Even though Radcliffe has outgrown the wonderful wizarding world of Harry Potter, he told the host that letting go of the character that defined his formative years was difficult. “On the last day, it was just really emotional. I didn’t really expect to get emotional even though it was 10 years of my life, but I just I wept like a child. As soon as we stopped filming, it was very, very strange to leave it behind.”

Mendez, Groff and Radcliffe are starring together in Broadway’s revival of George Furth and Stephen Sondheim’s “Merrily We Roll Along.” The production will be the musical’s first on Broadway since its original 1981 original run flopped after running for only 16 performances. The latest production starring Radcliffe has been heralded as a smash success and will run through March 2024.

The Times theater critic Charles McNulty wrote that the key to “Merrily We Roll Along” finally rolling along just right is Groff’s performance as Franklin Shepard, while noting a respected theater critic colleague argued that the production’s key performance is Mendez’s Mary Flynn. And on Facebook, he added, many discerning commentators are raving about Radcliffe’s Charley Kringas.

“The triangle, it must be said, is beautifully balanced, but Groff for me is the emotional hypotenuse of a production that I can’t wait to see again after it moves to Broadway in the fall,” McNulty wrote in January. “How will I feel about the revival nearly a year later in a less intimate venue? Who can say? But part of the excitement of repeat theatergoing is not knowing how something overlooked might reach deep into your heart and detonate new meaning.”

Times staff writer Nardine Saad contributed to this report.