Daniel Radcliffe has been open in the past about how he turned to alcohol to cope with all the fame that Harry Potter came with.
Now, in a new interview, the 29-year-old actor revealed just why he turned to drinking in the first place.
“There is an awareness that I really struggled with particularly in my late teens when I was going out to places for the first time where you would feel…again it could have largely been in my head but…you would feel watched when you went into a bar, when you went into a pub,” Daniel explained to Off Camera with Sam Jones.
“Then, in my case, the quickest way of forgetting about the fact that you were being watched was to get very drunk and then as you get very drunk, you become aware that, ‘oh people are watching more now because now I’m getting very drunk, so I should probably drink more to ignore that more’.”
The Miracle Workers actor continued that “part of the thing is the expectation that you should just be delighted all the time. You have a great job, you’re wealthy, you don’t have a right to not be excited about the thing all the time. I think that’s a pressure as well. You suddenly start to feel, ‘Man, if I am just feeling some human emotion of sadness, does that mean I’m doing this wrong? Am I not good at being famous?’”
Daniel also talks about how he made the decision to stop what he was doing altogether.
“I have been unbelievably lucky with the people I had around me at certain times in my life. I met some really key people, some actors some of them not, who just gave me great advice and really cared for me. Ultimately it was just my own decision. I woke up one morning after a night, going, ‘This is probably not good.’”
