The stars of Kill Your Darlings talk about their month-long staycation at Radcliffe’s home, epic games of Cards Against Humanity, and their “grounded perspective that we have on our weird lives.” Warning: This is pretty effing cute.
Dane DeHaan and Daniel Radcliffe at a screening for Kill Your Darlings on Sept. 30, 2013 in New York City
Andrew H. Walker / Getty Images
When doing press for a film, actors will usually wax poetic about how much fun they had on set, how everyone got along like gangbusters, and how they're all the best of chums now and forever.
And usually, that's not really the case. Actors get along fine, or they don't, but then they simply move on to the next gig. There is the rare occasion, however, when a genuine friendship blooms among co-stars that lingers well after the sets have been struck and the movie's premiered.
While working on the 1940s period drama Kill Your Darlings (opening on Wednesday, Oct. 16), Daniel Radcliffe and Dane DeHaan discovered such a friendship.
In the film, Radcliffe plays future Beat Generation poet Allen Ginsberg as a wide-eyed Columbia University freshman, who enters into a complicated friendship with fellow student Lucien Carr, played in the film by DeHaan (Chronicle, The Place Beyond the Pines, and next summer's The Amazing Spider-Man 2). Carr introduces Ginsberg to two other major Beat Generation writers, Jack Kerouac (Jack Huston) and William S. Burroughs (Ben Foster), as well as Carr's obsessive ex-boyfriend David Kammerer (Michael C. Hall). More importantly, Carr's sexual exuberance and natural charisma awakens Ginsberg's heretofore repressed homosexuality.
It is the most challenging on-screen role of Radcliffe's post-Harry Potter career, but the actor says it was also a unique filmmaking experience for him for an entirely different reason.
"Because where I grew up on film [on Harry Potter], I was the only one who was there every day out of the cast," he says. "So the people I got closest to were the crew. Generally, that's been the case with me on film sets, is that I got very close with the crew. [Kill Your Darlings] is the first film I've done that had a company feeling throughout the actors. With me and Dane and Ben and Michael and Jack — everyone brought something very different, and it worked very well together."
Thanks to their on-camera intimacy and off-camera camaraderie, Radcliffe and DeHaan have especially formed a fast friendship that is self-evident the moment you get the two of them in a room. When told their joint interview would be about how that friendship formed and endured, Radcliffe immediately turns to DeHaan.
Daniel Radcliffe: We're going to end up talking about you beating me at fantasy football, aren't we?
Dane DeHaan: (Smiles) Mmmhmm.
DR: OK, it's going to go that way. (Laughs nervously)
DD: From the beginning of our friendship to the end of our friendship.
DR: (Laughs louder)
DD: (Laughs)
DR: Which ended the other day. (Laughs)
The two are, in a word, adorable, and they happily shared how their friendship began, and how it has lasted once the cameras stopped rolling.
Daniel Radcliffe and Dane DeHaan
Larry Busacca / Getty Images
The first time Radcliffe, 24, and DeHaan, 27, met was in an audition room with Kill Your Darlings co-writer-director John Krokidas. Radcliffe had already signed on to play Allen Ginsberg, and he and Krokidas were searching for the right actor to tackle the role of Lucien Carr. When DeHaan walked in, Radcliffe didn't know much about him, which helped DeHaan make a significant impression. "The first thing we were struck by was how much he looked like Lucien [Carr] in all of the photos we have of him," says Radcliffe. "And he did a fucking great audition. Me and John Krokidas left going, 'Everyone else is kind of fucked.'"
DeHaan, meanwhile, entered knowing less about Radcliffe than pretty much the rest of the world. "I had never seen a Harry Potter movie," he says. "I obviously knew who he was, but I wasn't terribly familiar with him as an actor. So I went in almost with no expectations. To me, he was just the person that was doing this movie I was auditioning for. I didn't know if he was a good actor or a bad actor. That audition for me was a way for me to meet Dan and get to know Dan as a little bit as an actor. He was certainly thoroughly impressive from the start. Like, honestly, probably more impressive than I would have assumed he would be. Even, like, his accent was great, which is a little thing, but if it's bad, it becomes a really big thing!"
At this point, Radcliffe starts laughing and vigorously nodding his head. "He was so grounded and present and curious and kind of had all of these qualities that I look for in people that I want to work with," DeHaan continues. "I think that encounter was a really good base for what became a really great working relationship and a really great friendship."
