Harry survives 1st sex scene
2007-09-12 13:49
New York - Daniel Radcliffe's
first kiss as Harry Potter attracted global attention but in
reality the 18-year-old British actor already had lost his
on-screen virginity.
The setting for the love scene with Australian actress
Teresa Palmer - filmed when Radcliffe was 16 - was a remote
cave by the Australian shore for the movie December Boys.
It is his first major role outside the boy wizard film series.
The movie opens in the United States and Britain on Friday
and will make its debut in Australia later this month.
Radcliffe, who has since appeared nude on the London stage
in Equus and hopes to do so again on Broadway, said filming
the sex scene was laughable and decidedly not sexy.
"It's a laugh. It's very, very hard to stop giggling I
found," Radcliffe told Reuters.
"I suppose the thing I was
worried about was, 'Am I going to get an erection? Is this
going to be really sexy? Is this going to be a bit awkward?'
"But when you get in there, it's not sexy in the
slightest," he said.
December Boys is the tale of four boys on a beach holiday
away from their outback Australian orphanage home. Radcliffe
plays the eldest boy, named Maps.]
Guiding the nervous
"What was quite nice about doing that scene was the dynamic
between my character and Teresa's character was very much like
it was between us as actors on that day because I had never
done a sex scene before, Teresa had done a few," he said.
"I was quite nervous and she was sort of guiding me through
it," said Radcliffe, who is about to start filming the sixth
Harry Potter movie.
Radcliffe started playing Potter when he was 11 and found
that the December Boys role gave him confidence when he
returned to Britain to film Order of the Phoenix, the movie
in which Harry's kiss with Cho Chang attracted global attention
from fans and the media.
"It was a character who was very, very different from Harry
and I wanted to prove to myself really ... that I could do
something else," Radcliffe said of Maps.
Preconceived notions
"You think, 'Right, I can survive outside this world.'
Because that's the fear - 'Oh god, what if I go on to another
film set and I just can't hack it,'" he said.
Well mannered, mature and possessor of a reported $40m fortune, Radcliffe said before he started on December
Boys he was nervous about how his colleagues would perceive
him.
He said there was a stereotype of younger actors "being
just brats and horrible people."
"Fortunately, they didn't seem to have those preconceived
notions," he said. "In America child actors are treated like
actors first and then children, whereas in England they're
treated as children first and then actors.
"So if you're getting too big for your boots no one will
have any worries about saying shut up, whereas in America I
think possibly people pander to it more than is healthy," he
said.
"There's not a huge amount of sycophancy in my life."