For Daniel Radcliffe, it felt good to be bad.
The English actor, who rose to fame playing the heroic Harry Potter, embraced portraying an eccentric villain in the new adventure-comedy “The Lost City.”
“It’s always nice to do something different. It’s not something I do a lot of in my career, sort of as the bad guy, so it’s very, very fun,” Radcliffe told the Daily News.
“There’s great stuff about playing a hero … but it’s lovely to spend a film not having to be the emotional center of the film or the eyes of the audience or anything like that, and just to kind of go, oh yeah, I don’t even have to be sympathetic or likable or any of those things. There’s something very freeing about that.”
Radcliffe stars in the movie, in theaters today, as Abigail Fairfax, a bombastic billionaire obsessed with recovering an ancient artifact from the Lost City of D.
He kidnaps romantic novelist Loretta Sage, played by Sandra Bullock, after she references the Lost City in her book, hoping she can help him find the treasure. Loretta’s cover model, portrayed by Channing Tatum, then begins an ill-equipped rescue mission, kicking off chaos in the jungle.
“It’s very, very heightened in situations and the characters are in danger all the time, but even in those situations everyone’s still very quippy and funny,” Radcliffe said. “There’s something very classic feeling about that. The journey the audience should go on is really just fun. There’s great action and there’s thriller elements, and it is a very compelling story, but ultimately you’re kept hooked because you love the characters.”
Radcliffe, 32, enjoyed playing a villain in a comedy, saying he approached the antagonist role differently than he would have in a straight drama.
