Daniel Radcliffe Talks About His Gay Scene in “Killing Your Darlings"
BY NICHOLAS HUNT/PATRICKMCMULLAN.COM.
Playing a college-age Allen Ginsberg in Kill Your Darlings, Daniel Radcliffe portrayed the Beat poet just blossoming as a person, experimenting with life, drugs, and sex. But the toughest thing about the role was having to cry. “Whenever you, as an actor, see in a script a line like Allen weeps openly, you always go, Oh, Jesus,because you’re going to have to cry,” the actor said at a Cinema Society screening on Monday. “You know, some people can do that on cue. They just fucking can do it. I cannot. So it took some working up to it,” he said.
But once the tears began flowing, they were hard to end. “Once I started, I was in danger of not stopping,” Radcliffe told VF Daily at the Paris Theatre in Manhattan. “It was a pretty cathartic moment to do that for the first time and really—at the risk of sounding pretentious—feel it. It was lovely.”
Although Radcliffe’s gay-sex scene in the film has generated a lot of buzz, that wasn’t difficult to do. “I don’t really see the sex scene in this film as a risk. It just was a part of the movie,” he said. “I totally understand that people are going to talk about it, because it’s salacious and whatever, but the thing that was much more nerve wracking to me about this film was hitting all those big emotional beats.”
Co-star Dane DeHaan had a different type of catharsis while shooting the film. “It was definitely fun killing Dexter,” said DeHaan, who plays Lucien Carr, murderer of David Kammerer (Michael C. Hall).
The two actors were not laughing ironically while shooting the murder scene. “We were taking ourselves pretty seriously,” DeHaan said. “We weren’t thinking, Now I’m killing Dexter. Looking back on it, that is what happened,” he added, laughing.
As the movie is based on a true story about the beginnings of the Beat movement, when Ginsberg, Carr, and Jack Kerouac met at Columbia University, DeHaan went to the source for research. “The script is written really well, and it’s a really good clue into who the character is,” he said. “But also, actually, Columbia library has a lot of correspondence between Ginsberg and Kerouac, and Ginsberg’s journal, where they talk about Lucien, and it gives a lot of clues about who he was and the things he did, so I went back there.”
Recently, DeHaan took on a different kind of role, as a model in Prada’s spring-summer ad campaign. “One thing it does is it affords me to continue doing projects that I’m truly passionate about and that kind of thing,” DeHaan told VF Daily. “My wife is jealous about the amount of Prada in my closet,” he said, laughing.
After the screening, at a Johnston & Murphy–hosted party at the newly opened Tao Downtown, DeHaan’s wife, Anna Wood, confirmed this. “We have a Prada closet now—of course I’m jealous,” she said. “But, you know, all in good time.”
Vanity Fair
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