Harry Potter Is Our Generation: Interview With Daniel Radcliffe

“Harry Potter Is Our Generation” was the seventh most popular worldwide trending topic on Twitter today, with many people tweeting about their remembrances of the famous wizarding world of Harry Potter. An entire 14 years has passed between the debut of the first Harry potter book by JK Rowling and the final movie. The Huffington Post managed to score an interview with Daniel Radcliffe who is the grown muggle version of the wizard child we watched grow up.

An entire generation became hooked on the epic tale of magic, friendship and heroism. The words “Harry Potter” instantly evoke a response that you would otherwise not expect from such a humble name. Harry Potter could be said to have had an impact on our whole culture.

“It is,” says Daniel Radcliffe, “something that has. It’s in the collective consciousness of a generation, and there are words that are now filtering into the language, like Quidditch and Muggle. It’s a shared set of references, I suppose, and it’s quite universal. Potter was so massively wide-ranging, and read by everyone.”

Read by both this writer and the journalist at the Huffington Post, I might add.

“I’m always pleased,” continued Daniel Radcliffe, , “to be associated with something that was so important. And it’s not just a franchise. It’s only really in the past few years that that word has been bandied around, and it makes everything seem very cold and business-like. We were always wanting to prove ourselves and get better with every film.”

Radcliffe has been experimenting with a variety of artistic pursuits since ending Harry Potter. In every effort he’s been trying to give it his best.

“What’s been great about the last year and a half is that I have found a confidence. Before, basically, by the time we got to the end of Potter, I was going ‘I don’t know if I can do this, I don’t know if I’m good enough’.”

Radcliffe talks about Gary Oldman, who turned to him on his last day of playing Sirius and asked if he thought he’d been any good.

“I think,” he says, “the things I have on my side are whatever ability you have naturally, but on its own that’s worthless, you have to want to work.”

My first remembrance of hearing about Harry Potter was seeing the book cover and thinking to myself, “Harry Potter…what an odd name for a book.” If Harry Potter is our generation, what do you remember most about Harry Potter?