Harry Potter actor Daniel Radcliffe conjures up his first Tony Award
NEW YORK – Daniel Radcliffe is one of the world’s most famous actors. But he has never won a major award. Until now.
Radcliffe won the Tony Award on June 16 for Best Performance by an Actor in a Featured Role in a Musical, for his work in the smash hit revival of late American composer Stephen Sondheim’s Merrily We Roll Along.
The show is Radcliffe’s fifth on Broadway, but the first for which he was even nominated for a Tony, despite mostly admiring reviews all along the way.
Radcliffe, 34, will forever be known as the actor who played the title wizard in all eight Harry Potter films (2001 to 2011). But even before shooting of those films concluded, he had begun making the adventurous choices – onstage and onscreen – that have helped him accomplish the rare transition from child star to respected adult actor.
In Merrily, Radcliffe plays Charley Kringas, a lyricist-turned-playwright whose long friendship and collaboration with a talented composer (a character named Franklin Shepard, played by American actor Jonathan Groff) has imploded.
Radcliffe’s enormous star power is a significant factor in the success of this production, which promises to forever alter how Merrily is viewed because the show’s original production, in 1981, was a storied flop.
Radcliffe has been with the production since 2022, when he played the same role, with the same co-stars, during an off-Broadway run at the non-profit New York Theatre Workshop. The Broadway production opened last October, and is scheduled to conclude on July 7.
Radcliffe has repeatedly shown a willingness to try new things. The actor first arrived on Broadway in 2008, starring in a revival of Equus that required him to appear nude; his next role, in a 2011 revival of the musical How To Succeed In Business Without Really Trying, required him to sing.
He has since returned to Broadway to star in two more plays, The Cripple Of Inishmaan in 2014 and The Lifespan Of A Fact in 2018, and he also starred in an off-Broadway play, Privacy, in 2016 at the Public Theatre in New York.
He has continued to make movies, many of them indie-ish projects including Kill Your Darlings (2013), Swiss Army Man (2016) and Weird: The Al Yankovic Story (2022).
In an interview in May, two days after being nominated for the Tony Award, Radcliffe said that he keeps returning to the stage “because I love it”.
“There’s something thrilling about doing something that scares you, live, a bit, every night,” he said.
“And just the connection with the audience – being in a room full of people and feeling them react to the story. We’re very lucky it’s such an emotional show: There’s a lot laughs, and there’s a lot of comedy, but you can also hear people being emotionally affected by it towards the end, and that’s a very rewarding thing to be a part of.”
Meanwhile, The Outsiders, a muscular musical based on the classic young adult novel, was named Best New Musical at the Tony Awards on June 16, while Stereophonic, a behind-the music play about a band making an album, was named Best New Play.
Merrily We Roll Along completed a four-decade journey from flop to hit by winning the Best Musical Revival Prize, while Appropriate, American playwright Branden Jacobs-Jenkins’ family drama about a trio of siblings confronting an unsettling secret, won Best Play Revival.
The 77th Tony Awards ceremony, which took place at Lincoln Centre in New York, was hosted by Oscar-winning actress Ariana DeBose for the third straight year. NYTIMES
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