Daniel Radcliffe’s “Weird Al” has “insane darkness”

Daniel Radcliffe is weird. No, really, he’s playing “Weird Al” Yankovic in next month’s Weird: The Al Yankovic Story and it’s one of the most unique performances of Daniel Radcliffe’s career, like he was born to be weird and not just a wizard.

The Harry Potter movies are embedded in Daniel Radcliffe–and in the nearly unprecedented fanbase, something he has been aware of his entire career. “I had this awareness that people expected we would do nothing after Potter–that we would fade away,” he explained in a new GQ profile. “I really wanted that not to be the case, because I knew that I loved it, and I wanted to do whatever I have to do to have a career with longevity.”

Daniel Radcliffe certainly has had that. After hanging up his cloak and wand, Radcliffe has played a number of diverse characters: poet Allen Ginsburg, Dr. Frankenstein’s assistant and a farting corpse–in different movies, of course. Now, he is playing the parody-writin’, accordion-slingin’, Hawaiian shirt-wearin’ “Weird Al” Yankovic in about the weirdest way possible.

No matter who Daniel Radcliffe is playing, he makes it his own. This also applied to “Weird Al”, in which Radcliffe plays an exaggerated version of Yankovic. One could easily slip into a mere aping when playing a real-life figure, but the parody style of the “Weird Al” biopic gave Radcliffe more freedom. “There’s an insane darkness to the character in the movie that freed me from the thing of, ‘Oh, you have to do an impersonation.’”

Also heightening the humor is the fact that Radcliffe is also in incredibly good shape. And while “Weird Al” is certainly not “fat” (no pun intended), he’s not exactly a gym rat–no matter what his turn as “Rambo” in UHF suggests. “It wasn’t a decision so much as they found it funny that that’s how I looked.”

Weird: The Al Yankovic Story comes to The Roku Channel on November 4th.