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Ten minutes before the start of Daniel Radcliffe’s one-man show on Broadway, Every Brilliant Thing, the actor is crouched in the aisle. He presses a card into the hand of a woman sitting six rows from the stage and instructs her to shout the line written on it when he cues her. He gently touches her arm to reassure her, and she flushes. As the former Harry Potter star walks away, another audience member—a stranger—leans across the aisle. “Are you OK?” she asks before brandishing her phone. “I got a picture, don’t worry!”
Every Brilliant Thing is an intimate and surprisingly buoyant play about someone who copes with their mother’s suicide attempts by cataloging every “brilliant” thing that makes life worth living. Since the show, by Duncan Macmillan and Jonny Donahoe, broke out at the Edinburgh Festival Fringe in 2014, it has played in 66 countries, starring actors from Minnie Driver to Phoebe Waller-Bridge. But on this afternoon in late February, attendees have trudged through the gray Manhattan slush to see—and, perhaps, be conscripted by—the boy who lived. Just a few days into previews, TikTok and Instagram are rife with videos of the star palling around with fans in the theater.
Radcliffe anticipated this. When he recruits a woman in my aisle to play a more substantial role, he confides in her that the people who seem too eager to leap onstage with him “scare me.” This from a man who once drew thousands of fans to Trafalgar Square to catch a glimpse of the teenage wizard at a film premiere. He is a touchstone of millennial childhood, and despite his best efforts to shed himself of Harry Potter—his first onstage role, in Equus in 2007, required nudity, effectively announcing his graduation from child actor—he can never quite escape its unyielding grip on the culture. Another audience member he pulled onstage, Radcliffe tells me the next day, turned out to be the father of a cast member of Harry Potter and the Cursed Child,…
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