Who’s gnarly, thin and slightly strange looking? Iggy Pop? Or perhaps it’s Daniel Radcliffe? Same difference, apparently, as according to a recent interview with the Harry Potter actor, both cultural icons share very similar physical attributes, something that’s prompted Radcliffe to reveal that he would be a good fit to immortalise the leathery skinned punk singer on screen.
Radcliffe was on KCRW radio’s Guest DJ Project to list five of his all-time favourite songs, and when asked if there was any rock star he would like to play in a film, Radcliffe responded that he’d often imagined playing the Stooges frontman. “Just cause we’ve got a similar, gnarly sort of slightly strange skinny bodies,” he said. “Where you’re like, ‘you’re skinny, but are you healthy?’ But I don’t know, other than that. What really short white rock stars were there?”
The actor and music obsessive – who appeared in a video for indie duo Slow Club in 2011 – picked his most prized pop and punk tracks, including Lou Reed’s Walk On the Wild Side, the Sex Pistols’ EMI, the Libertines’ Time For Heroes, Pixies’ Broken Face and Perfume Genius’s Hood. He claimed the Libertines “were the Sex Pistols of my generation”, that Perfume Genius had been “an inspiration for the last couple of years”, and said the Sex Pistols were “as important as the Beatles in terms of what they did for British music” adding: “John Lydon is smarter than you or me or anyone. He is not somebody I would like to get into a debate about anything.”
Radcliffe also described the stimulus for his early music taste, explaining how a crew member on the Harry Potter films sparked his initial interest in the punk genre. “All of my musical influences came from three people until I was about 14,” said Radcliffe. “It was my dad who introduced me to Bowie and T-Rex; my dresser on Potter, Will, who introduced me to punk; and then actually my driver on Potter, who drove me for the 10 years as well on most films, was a guy called Peter who introduced me to the 60s, basically.”
Daniel Radcliffe is currently promoting What If, a romantic comedy in which he stars with Zoe Kazan. His next film is Horns, based on the novel by Joe Hill.
• Peter Bradshaw reviews What If
