The Harry Potter Movie That Daniel Radcliffe Hates Watching

Between 2001 and 2011, eight “Harry Potter” movies hit theaters, with the final movie, “Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows,” split into two parts. After being cast in the lead role at an extraordinarily young age, Daniel Radcliffe played the titular Boy Who Lived beautifully throughout the entire franchise. Still, if you ask him, he wasn’t always great, which is to say that he’s not a particularly big fan of one specific installment.

Speaking to The Daily Mail back in 2014 about his career up until that point, Radcliffe said that he’s not an especially big fan of watching his own performances, which certainly isn’t unusual for performers … but he also made sure to give a shoutout to the sixth “Harry Potter” movie in a pretty negative way. “I never liked watching myself on film but I do make myself sit through it,” Radcliffe began. “I think it comes from not actually realizing I didn’t have to go to my own premieres and watch the film — that’s something I’ve only just realized you don’t have to do. I always went along and sat with everyone else watching the movie.”

That’s when Radcliffe fires shots at the penultimate part of the original “Harry Potter” franchise: “And that’s why it’s hard to watch a film like ‘Harry Potter And The Half-Blood Prince,’ because I’m just not very good in it. I hate it. My acting is very one-note and I can see I got complacent and what I was trying to do just didn’t come across.”

This is rough to hear, but understandable, even though Radcliffe is probably his own worst critic. “Half-Blood Prince,” the “Harry Potter” movie where Harry and his mentor, Hogwarts headmaster Albus Dumbledore (Michael Gambon), discover much more about Harry’s enemy Voldemort (Ralph Fiennes), is essential viewing for the series, but obviously Radcliffe thinks otherwise.

Okay, so does Daniel Radcliffe have a particular favorite when it comes to the “Harry Potter” films? According to the same interview, he’s partial to “Harry Potter and the Order of the Phoenix.” As he put it at the time, “My best film is the fifth one […] because I can see a progression.”

This is a fair assessment, if only thanks to the fact that Harry has a seriously dynamic journey throughout “Order of the Phoenix.” At the start of the film, Harry is still reeling from the events of “Goblet of Fire,” where Voldemort returns to full power and murders his classmate Cedric Diggory (a pre-“Twilight” Robert Pattinson), and after a soul-sucking dementor visits the small Muggle town where he spends his holidays and forces him to perform illegal underage magic, his year isn’t off to a great start. Throughout his fifth year at Hogwarts School of Witchcraft and Wizardry, Harry battles the bureaucracy — in the form of his new Defense Against the Dark Arts professor Dolores Umbridge (Imelda Staunton), a Ministry of Magic plant sent to Hogwarts to interfere and report back — as well as dark forces lurking inside his head, ultimately learning that he and Voldemort share a much more intimate and horrifying mental connection than he ever could have anticipated.

“Order of the Phoenix” features a great performance from Radcliffe, who channels Harry’s teenage angst and genuine, legitimate fear and confusion surrounding his status as “The Boy Who Lived” to perfection. Still, Radcliffe is an unbelievably ambitious performer, and even before the “Harry Potter” franchise came to a close, he proved he’d take on just about any challenge as an actor.

While he was still playing the lead role in a notoriously family-friendly film franchise, Daniel Radcliffe made it quite clear that he wasn’t content to simply rest on his laurels in any sense by appearing in Peter Shaffer’s play “Equus” in both the West End of London and New York’s Broadway. (His “Harry Potter” uncle Richard Griffiths, who played Vernon Dursley in the films, joined him in the production on both sides of the pond.) The play required full nudity and a daring performance overall and made one thing very obvious: Radcliffe wanted to establish himself as a bold and adventurous actor beyond the wizarding world of “Harry Potter.” 

After the franchise ended, Radcliffe appeared in independent movies like “Kill Your Darlings” (where he played Beat poet Allan Ginsburg), “Swiss Army Man” (where he played a farting corpse), and “What If” (where he played a guy looking for love opposite Zoe Kazan) and continued working onstage and on the small screen. From his multiple performances in the anthology series “Miracle Workers” to his Tony-winning turn in a revival of Stephen Sondheim’s sprawling masterpiece “Merry We Roll Along,” Radcliffe, who also memorably played Weird Al Yankovic in the 2022 “biopic” “Weird: The Al Yankovic Story,” has never played it safe.

As Radcliffe told GQ in 2022 around the release of “Weird,” he was simply determined to build a career for himself after Harry. “I had this awareness that people expected we would do nothing after Potter — that we would fade away,” Radcliffe told the outlet. “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.” Radcliffe has done just that … and hopefully, he’s prouder of his more recent performances than the one he delivers in “Half-Blood Prince.”

The “Harry Potter” movies are streaming on Peacock now.