Daniel Radcliffe will grace the cover of the March issue of OUT magazine, discussing his role in the crime thriller, Kill Your Darlings, including his wanting to audition for the role of Allen Ginsberg, and what the story meant to him. A preview of the photo shoot, as well as the Harry Potter actor commenting on working with director John Krokidas, can be seen here.

“I think he was nervous about whether I would want to audition or not, and so at my first meeting with him I said, ‘I want to read, I want to audition,’ because at this point in my career, I am aware that my name brings a certain kind of cachet,” recalls the actor, who is the face of Out’s upcoming March cover.

“I want to know that a director wants me for me, rather than for the cachet. I can see why people are skeptical about me playing Allen Ginsberg, because I don’t like him—although, neither does James Franco—and I’m English and middle class, and not from New Jersey, but that’s what I think is so exciting about it, because people have no idea. I’ve always known I have potential to be a good actor, and I think more than a good actor, but I’ve also at times lacked the tools and didn’t have any training. When John was first auditioning me for Ginsberg, we hadn’t even done the seventh Harry Potter yet, so I was 17 or 18, and he had nothing else to go on apart from the fact that he’d seen me in Equus.”


Daniel Radcliffe: "For me, Kill Your Darlings is a film about young love in whatever form it takes. It wasn’t any more challenging than if you’re doing a [sexual] awakening scene with a girl. At no point did any of us want to do anything that would distinguish it from how we would fall in love with somebody—to my knowledge, there is no difference in how heterosexual and homosexual people fall in love. A lot of people are quick to ask if it’s a gay love story—well, yes, they are gay characters, but it’s just a love story.

The relationship between Allen [Ginsberg] and Lucien [Carr], I think is incredibly universal—you meet somebody who is far more confident, far more charismatic, and seemingly more intelligent than you, and you completely fall in love with them, and then you actually outgrow them, and they come to resent you for it. I think that’s the whole point of relationships is that they do absolutely move you on as a person, and you learn things about yourself as a person, things you like and don’t like, and things you can do better next time you are with somebody.

There were certainly relationships that I could draw on when thinking about my relationship with Lucien, and not all of them romantic relationships, some of them just relationships of professional mentorship, the couple of really great teachers I’d had—elements of all those relationships factored into Allen’s and my experience of Lucien.