Daniel Radcliffe Is TIFF's MVP With 'Kill Your Darlings,' 'The F Word,' and 'Horns'

Daniel Radcliffe is emerging as this year’s TIFF Most Valuable Player, with three very diverse films screening at the festival: Kill Your Darlings, The F Word and Horns, all of which are sure to solidify Radcliffe as more than Harry Potter.

Kill Your Darlings is an intense drama based on real events, The F Word a romantic comedy and Horns is a type of mystery thriller. The range of roles is telling of the versatile actor Radcliffe wants to be post-Harry Potter. Though he is adamant that his time playing the boy wizard is over, Radcliffe credits his early success with the Harry Potter franchise for his ability to choose film roles carefully.

“I was obviously made financially secure by Potter, and so I am able to just do what I like, in terms of picking projects, which is a fantastic freedom to have and one that very few young actors have. But you can’t really make that much of a strategy, because you don’t know what scripts are going to come in. It’s really just about picking things that you get enthusiastic about and that you’re going to be excited to do,” Radcliffe said in a recent interview with EW.

It seems Radcliffe picked well; all three of Radcliffe’s films have been earning good reviews, and the actor is being singled out by critics as giving great performances.

“Hitting all the rom-com notes with wit and some charm, [The F Word] will be a crowd-pleaser in theaters and help moviegoers move on from seeing co-star Daniel Radcliffe only as the world’s favorite wizard,” writes The Hollywood Reporter’s John DeFore.

In The F-Word, Radcliffe plays Wallace, a guy harboring feelings for one of his close friends, Chantry, played by Zoe Kazan. Radcliffe and Kazan told TIFF audiences on Saturday that their favorite experience shooting the film was when they had to go skinny-dipping in Lake Ontario.

“[Zoe and I] really braced ourselves, thinking it was going to be horrible and we ended up really having fun,” Radcliffe said.

Horns, based on a novel, is a fantastical murder mystery in which Radcliffe’s character, Ig, sprouts horns, causing people to associate him with Satan, and develops the power to attract people to tell him their intimate secrets after the death of his girlfriend (Juno Temple).

“The first third of this film is incredibly funny and then it has this love story, which to me is the most important part of it. I think to have all these ideas held within this incredibly original way, while also encapsulating huge amounts of religious mythology which I’m kind of in to, it was just very exciting and different,” Radcliffe told audiences after the Sept. 6 premiere.

Temple gushed about working with Radcliffe on the film, saying, "He is such a giving actor, it's insane."

“[Daniel] is such a giving actor, it’s insane,” Temple said of her co-star in an interview.

For Kill Your Darlings, Radcliffe completely shifts gears, playing Beat poet Allen Ginsberg circa-1944. Directed by John Krokidas, the film follows key members of the Beat Generation, including Jack Kerouac, while they were students at Columbia University.

Kill Your Darlings, which premiered earlier this year at the Sundance Film Festival, focuses on the earlier life of Ginsberg and his relationship with classmate Lucien Carr (Dane DeHaan), who becomes embroiled in a murder. Radcliffe and DeHaan are said to give gripping performances.

“While [Radcliffe] fully conveys the excitement of a young rebel determined to break down the establishment walls, he also anchors the film with well-judged vulnerability,” writes David Rooney for The Hollywood Reporter.

Kill Your Darlings hits theaters Oct. 16.

– Olivia Truffaut-Wong

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