Daniel Radcliffe’s Kill Your Darlings gay sex scene will ‘startle’ fans – or will it?
Daniel Radcliffe, 24, has survived Harry Potter. Last year, he starred in the horror thriller The Woman in Black, a major sleeper hit in the United Kingdom and a moderate one in several other countries, including the United States and Mexico.
Radcliffe’s next release is the John Krokidas-directed drama Kill Your Darlings, in which the former bespectacled young wizard plays bespectacled gay poet Allen Ginsberg, whose sexually daring poem “Howl” resulted in charges of obscenity in 1957.
And of course, when it came to gay sex, Ginsberg did more than just write poems. And that’s where Daniel Radcliffe will do some unHarry Potterish on-screen business.
Harry Potter goes gay
“I felt like I was breaking new ground,” Daniel Radcliffe is quoted as saying in Total Film. “Most actors grow up doing a lot of small movies and then get something big, but I started on the biggest film in the world. So it’s an experience that I haven’t had. I’m sure some people will be slightly … err … startled by the gay sex scene though.”
The “startling gay sex scene” in question features Daniel Radcliffe and the upcoming The Amazing Spider-Man 2’s Dane DeHaan, who plays Lucien Carr, Ginsberg’s lover at the time.
Now, there’s a limit to the startlingness…
“It’s actually not graphic,” Daniel Radcliffe elaborates. “You don’t actually see anything. What’s graphic is the emotion of the scene. It’s a very vulnerable, slightly afraid moment. It’s beautiful and tender as a consequence of that.”
Kill Your Darlings plot
Co-written by director John Krokidas and Austin Bunn, Kill Your Darlings is set around the time of the 1944 murder of David Kammerer (played by Michael C. Hall), a gay man madly infatuated with Lucien Carr. Carr himself committed the deed, claiming that Kammerer had sexually assaulted him.
Besides Daniel Radcliffe, Dane DeHaan, and Michael C. Hall, the Kill Your Darlings cast feature Jack Huston (grandson of The Maltese Falcon director John Huston) as Jack Kerouac, Ben Foster as William Burroughs, and David Cross as Louis Ginsberg.
In addition to Elizabeth Olsen as Edie Parker, Jennifer Jason Leigh as Naomi Ginsberg, Kyra Sedgwick as Marian Carr, and David Rasche, John Cullum, Erin Darke, and Clancy O’Connor.
A curiosity: Back in 2007, David Cross played Allen Ginsberg in Todd Haynes’ I’m Not There.
‘Kill Your Darlings’ release date & cast
Kill Your Darlings opens in the United States on Oct. 16. In the United Kingdom, the film will be screened at the London Film Festival on Oct. 18, but its official release date is Nov. 8.
Following its World Premiere at the Sundance Film Festival, Kill Your Darlings has received mostly positive notices to date. For all it’s worth – five critics – the movie has a 78 percent approval rating and 7/10 average at Rrottentomatoes.com.
Among Daniel Radcliffe’s other recent or soon-to-come-out titles are Horns and What If.
Recent Allen Ginsberg incarnations
In the last few years, besides Daniel Radcliffe and David Cross, a trio of other actors have played Allen Ginsberg (or a version of him):
- Tom Sturridge (as the character Carlo Marx) in Walter Salles’ On the Road (2012)
- James Franco in Rob Epstein & Jeffrey Friedman’s Howl (2010)
- The voice of Hank Azaria in Brett Morgen’s Chicago 10 (2007)
Daniel Radcliffe and Dane DeHaan Kill Your Darlings image: Sony Pictures Classics.
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