When Ben Radcliffe was seven, he got the role that would permanently seal his love of performing: an unnamed orphan in the West End production of Oliver Twist. Twenty years later, he’s acted alongside Austin Butler and Callum Turner, Damian Lewis and John Travolta—but Radcliffe still describes the year he was in Oliver Twist as “one of the best years of my life.” (Not all roles would be quite so enriching—just after Oliver Twist, he got his first on-screen part in a children’s show for the British morning channel CITV: “I played some kid who was obsessed with snails,” he recalls.)
Growing up in Leeds, in northern England, Radcliffe and his sister never knew a life without the arts. Their mother, a former professional dancer, used to push them in a stroller around the sets of the British soap operas Emmerdale and Coronation Street. By the time they could walk, she had them enrolled in acting, dancing, and singing classes, hoping to encourage an interest in performing. It worked.
Today, Radcliffe has a wave of movies and TV shows under his belt (Anatomy of a Scandal, with Sienna Miller and Michelle Dockery; The Witcher, with Superman’s Henry Cavill), the most recent being Fackham Hall, a Downton Abbey–meets–Monty Python spoof written by the comedian Jimmy Carr, out now in select theaters.
In Fackham Hall (which is pronounced exactly how you’d think), Radcliffe plays Eric Noone, a rapscallion thief turned porter in the household of the wealthy Davenport family. J. R. R. Tolkien wanders the halls speaking Orc, the satirical Bechdel sisters gossip about men in the corner, and servants named Alexa and Siri can be summoned with a simple shout. Shenanigans ensue when Eric falls for Lord Davenport’s youngest daughter, Rose (played by Thomasin McKenzie), and then gets framed for an unexpected murder.
The film also stars Damian Lewis as Lord Davenport, Katherine Waterston as Lady Davenport, and Harry Potter’s Tom Felton as the Davenports’ cousin and heir apparent, Archibald. “They got this cast together—people that are so talented [at] doing really serious drama,” Radcliffe says. “They bring that same kind of gravitas to this comedy, and that’s what makes it so funny.”
It’s not Radcliffe’s first comedy—he made his feature-film debut at the age of 13 in Cuban Fury, the story of an overweight former salsa dancer played by Nick Frost who reconnects with his childhood passion. Radcliffe plays the younger version of Frost’s character. (Those dance classes came in handy, after all.) But it wasn’t until taking on the part of Danny Zuko’s right-hand man, Kenickie, a couple of years later in his high school’s production of Grease, that he finally caught the eye of an agent and began booking bigger roles.
Six years later, in a fortuitous turn of events, Radcliffe found himself starring alongside Travolta himself in the short film The Shepherd. Radcliffe plays an R.A.F. pilot who, on Christmas Eve in 1957, experiences multiple-instrument failure while flying over the North Sea. He’s saved by a mysterious fellow pilot (Travolta), who guides him to safety. “I actually showed him the video of me doing ‘Greased Lightnin’,” Radcliffe says. “He loved it.”
Less than a year after shooting The Shepherd, Radcliffe got back in the pilot’s seat—this time, for Apple TV’s Masters of the Air, in which he played the American airman John D. Brady. “It was the most immersive job I’ve ever done,” he says of the Tom Hanks–Steven Spielberg production, about the U.S. Air Force’s 100th Bomb Group during World War II.
The cast was almost entirely made up of young men around his age. Four hundred, to be exact. “We had some good times,” Radcliffe recalls. “And then on top of that, fucking good actors in that show. Watching those guys—Callum [Turner], Austin [Butler], people like them—it’s great and so valuable to see how people do this [job].”
Despite his many months in the cockpit, Radcliffe made it clear that he still cannot fly an aircraft. “But,” he insists, “I’ve spent plenty of time with flight instructors, so I can really look like I can fly a plane.”
When we spoke in October, Radcliffe was in Prague filming his biggest role yet: the society gentleman Newland Archer in the upcoming Netflix adaptation of The Age of Innocence, in which he stars alongside Camila Morrone (Daisy Jones & the Six) and Kristine Froseth (The Buccaneers). Radcliffe says it’ll be “very different” than Martin Scorsese’s 1993 version, with Daniel Day-Lewis, Michelle Pfeiffer, and Winona Ryder. He read Edith Wharton’s original novel in preparation for the part and found it “amazing.” But at the same time, doing so made him feel the pressure in adapting such a treasured book. “Because people love it so much, it’s like, O.K., I need to do this right.”
That fear did anything but stop him. “One of the things that I love most about this job is that it’s constantly pushing yourself out of your comfort zone,” he says. “Always make the hard decision. I’m a believer in that. If you’ve got some choices, make the hard choice.”
Fackham Hall is currently showing in select theaters
Paulina Prosnitz is an Associate Editor at AIR MAIL
