Daniel Radcliffe’s First Post-Potter Movie “The Woman in Black”

Now that the world has said its goodbyes to the Harry Potter franchise, one of the biggest questions is what kind of a post-Potter career the actors will have. It’s not like any of them are hurting for money, so unless they waste their fortunes on hookers and blow, the point of the exercise is a purely artistic one.

Tom Felton, the kid who played Draco, was first out of the gate with his appearance in Rise of the Planet of the Apes
. That audiences hardly connected his role in that movie to his decade-long run as Harry Potter’s schoolyard nemesis bodes well for him. Rupert Grint, who played Ron Weasley, and Emma Watson , who played Hermione Granger, have yet to star in anything significant, though according to IMDB, Watson has two movies lined up for 2012, and Grint has four movies for late 2011 and 2012.

Still, are movie audiences going to accept Daniel Radcliffe as anyone other than Harry Potter? Will he be cursed with the same fate as Mark Hamill? There’s really never been a test case of a young actor so solidly identified with one role before. Judging from his turn on the theater stage in Equus and How to Succeed in Business Without Really Trying bodes well.

Despite starring in the little-seen and under-appreciated December Boys back in 2007, the upcoming haunted house thriller, The Woman in Black, will be the first cinematic test of whether or not Radcliffe will have a post-Potter acting career on the screen.

It’s hard to tell much about this atmospheric trailer, but starring in a movie like this is a good move on the part of Radcliffe. It’s scary, it’s adult, he looks like a leading man from what little he’s in the trailer, and it’s as far removed from Harry Potter as an actor could get. He’ll probably have to take a few roles like this mixed in with some rom-coms, but there’s a feeling about Radcliffe that he’s in it for the long haul.