Daniel Radcliffe is back on Broadway in a one-man show that requires improv, a hefty amount of audience participation and a script that he must rewrite on the fly each show.
It’s not the scariest thing he’s ever done. But it’s close.
“It’s probably second behind ‘How To Succeed.’ I feel like doing the dancing was really, truly a bridge further than I ever thought I would cross,” Radcliffe said of his turn leading the 2011 Broadway musical.
Still, Radcliffe is looking forward to the challenge. The play, Every Brilliant Thing, written by Duncan Macmillan and Jonny Donahoe, is about a man whose mother attempted to die by suicide when he was young. He attempts to cheer her up by listing things that make life worth living, from the innocuous to the profound. As he grows up and battles with his own depression, he adds in more brilliant things, with help from the audience who are asked to shout out items written on slips of paper.
Audience members also step in to play various characters throughout the main character’s life, though Radcliffe stresses: “I would like to take this opportunity to say nobody who doesn’t want to do anything will be asked to do anything.”
It was the audience participation, particularly the pre-show in which Radcliffe runs around the theater to select attendees to take part in the performance, that drew him in.
“I feel like it scratches an itch of there’s something in there that I’ll never be asked to do again. There’s elements of the show that are so unfamiliar. Whenever I find something that’s like, there’s part of it that feels like a very good fit and that sits kind of in my comfort zone, and then there’s part of it that’s like absolutely nothing that I’ve ever done before, that’s a very exciting combination,” he said.
The play brings Radcliffe back to the Hudson Theatre, where he performed in the revival of Merrily We Roll Along through July 2024 and won a Tony Award for his portrayal of the neurotic lyricist Charlie Kringas. The Harry Potter actor wasn’t planning to return to Broadway so quickly. But he jumped back in due to the strength of the script, and after hearing the advice from other actors that it becomes harder to do Broadway with children as they enter elementary school (his son is currently in nursery school).
“I just kind of, I was like, right, let’s make hay while the sun shines and get straight back in there,” he said.
The show also fits into his career trajectory post-Potter, where he’s been seeking out roles that stretch his limits, including playing Weird Al Jankovic in the Roku movie and a flatulent corpse in Swiss Army Man, as well as playing a stable boy with an unhealthy fixation on horses in Equus on Broadway amid Potter filming.
At the moment, he is balancing the play with a sitcom role on NBC’s The Fall and Rise of Reggie Dinkins opposite Tracy Morgan and Erika Alexander, which is a deeper move into comedy for Radcliffe and “a really lovely sitcom,” but as he notes “not a huge amount of pushing myself.” (He also offers up this tidbit about his co-star: “Anyone who ever gets the chance to go to Tracy Morgan’s house, take it. You will not regret it.”)
Every Brilliant Thing began previews Feb. 21, ahead of a March 12 opening. To prepare for Radcliffe’s take on the show, Macmillan updated the script, which was first performed in 2013, to reflect his age and background as well as changed some verbiage so that it fits more naturally into Radcliffe’s speech cadence. And then, of course, Radcliffe has to mentally adjust the script each performance to accommodate for whatever happens with the audience participation.
“I think one of the things I’m gonna have to try and learn on this is to kind of have amnesia,” Radcliffe said. “If there was a great thing that happened last night, it’s not gonna happen tonight again, and that has to be OK. And we’ll find there will be other things that are really great tonight.”
The stage directions for the play state that it “can be performed by anyone anywhere, and any references should be amended to the place and the person that’s performing it.” Thus far, the production has been done at a theater in the West End with Minnie Driver, in a tent with Phoebe Waller-Bridge and in more than 66 countries across the world, including in Bangladesh, where a woman performs it in people’s living rooms, and in the Philippines, where there’s even more audience interaction.
“The script now functions as a history of the show a little bit. And I’m obsessed with the woman who did it in the Philippines,” Radcliffe said. “Because there’s lots of moments in the script where the characters come close to kissing, and obviously we don’t, because they are audience members and it’s a Broadway play, and I’m not going to be doing that with anyone. But Kakki Teodoro made out with so many people, I was just like, ‘Yeah, good for you, man, that’s awesome.’”
As for why the play continues to be so popular, Macmillan notes that for one, it’s typically “cheap” to produce, given that it’s a one-person show and can be made bespoke for any scenario, but it also speaks to a topic that resonates with audiences globally: “It’s OK to talk about your mental health. And if you need help, then ask for it,” Macmillan says.
Macmillan and director Jeremy Herrin, who has directed prior productions of the play, have a somewhat scientific process to prepare each actor for the audience interactions, including bringing strangers to the rehearsal room early on. There is the matter of Radcliffe’s celebrity to work around, but they say he is a “very courageous performer” and very eager to interact with theatergoers, in a way that not all performers have been. Plus, it helps that he’s actually nice.
“The whole gesture of this show is kindness and compassion and that we’re not alone, and we all sort of feel this way sometimes. And Dan just has that to his core. He’s such an incredibly clever, hard-working person, but he’s also just a very nice person, and so that’s something we just haven’t had to practice to get him to fake. It’s just inherently there,” Macmillan said.
