Daniel Radcliffe: Gay Sex Scene in Kill Your Darlings to ‘Startle’ Fans

Daniel Radcliffe: Gay sex scene with Dane DeHaan in Kill Your Darlings will “startle” fans.

Daniel Radcliffe: Gay sex scene in ‘Kill Your Darlings’ will ‘startle’ fans

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 Harry Potter 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.

Gay sex scene

“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, those eagerly looking forward to being startled by some hot and heavy, explicit gay sex featuring the former Harry Potter will be mighty disappointed.

“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, Elizabeth Olsen as Edie Parker, Jennifer Jason Leigh as Naomi Ginsberg, David Cross as Louis Ginsberg, Kyra Sedgwick as Marian Carr, plus 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 October 16, 2013. In the United Kingdom, the film will be screened at the London Film Festival on October 18, but its official release date is November 8.

Following its World Premiere at the Sundance Film Festival, Kill Your Darlings has received mostly positive notices to date. The film has a 78 percent approval rating and 7/10 average among Rotten Tomatoes‘ critics. (Only five top critics have been polled, so I’m using the “all critics” figures here.)

Before Daniel Radcliffe: A couple more recent Allen Ginsberg incarnations

Daniel Radcliffe is the latest actor to play indie favorite Allen Ginsberg in a movie. Last year, Tom Sturridge was seen as a fictionalized Ginsberg – “Carlo Marx” – in Walter Salles’ On the Road.

Salles’ film adaptation of Jack Kerouac’s novel received mixed reviews at its 2012 Cannes Film Festival premiere, eventually doing decent arthouse business in France and Brazil. In the United States, however, the film was a box office bomb. In the cast: Sam Riley as a fictionalized Jack Kerouac, Garrett Hedlund as a fictionalized Neal Cassady, Viggo Mortensen as a fictionalized William S. Burroughs, Kristen Stewart, Amy Adams, Alice Braga, and Kirsten Dunst.

In 2010, James Franco played Allen Ginsberg – older than Daniel Radcliffe’s; at the time of his obscenity trial – in Rob Epstein and Jeffrey Friedman’s little-seen Howl. Other cast members included Todd Rotondi as Jack Kerouac and Jon Prescott as Neal Cassady.

Allen Ginsberg movies

Here’s a brief of the Allen Ginsberg movies mentioned further up:

• Kill Your Darlings (2013). Daniel Radcliffe.
  Director: John Krokidas.
  Cast: Dane DeHaan. Michael C. Hall. Jack Huston. Ben Foster. David Cross. Jennifer Jason Leigh. Elizabeth Olsen. John Cullum. David Rasche. Michael Cavadias. Kyra Sedgwick. Kevyn Settle. Zach Appelman.
• On the Road (2012). Tom Sturridge (as the character Carlo Marx).
  Director: Walter Salles.
  Cast: Garrett Hedlund. Sam Riley. Kristen Stewart. Amy Adams. Kirsten Dunst. Elisabeth Moss. Alice Braga. Viggo Mortensen. Danny Morgan. Terrence Howard. Steve Buscemi. Leif Anderson. Michael Sarrazin.
• Howl (2010). James Franco.
  Director: Rob Epstein. Jeffrey Friedman.
  Cast: Todd Rotondi. Jon Prescott. Aaron Tveit. David Strathairn. Jon Hamm. Andrew Rogers. Bob Balaban. Mary-Louise Parker. Treat Williams. Alessandro Nivola. Jeff Daniels.
• I’m Not There (2007). David Cross.
  Director: Todd Haynes.
  Cast: Cate Blanchett. Ben Whishaw. Christian Bale. Richard Gere. Marcus Carl Franklin. Heath Ledger. Kris Kristofferson (voice). Don Francks. Julianne Moore. Charlotte Gainsbourg. Peter Friedman. Bruce Greenwood.
• Chicago 10 (2007). Hank Azaria (voice).
  Director: Brett Morgen.
  Voice Cast: Dylan Baker. Nick Nolte. Mark Ruffalo. Roy Scheider. Liev Schreiber. Jeffrey Wright. Amy Ryan. James Urbaniak. Catherine Curtin. Ebon Moss-Bachrach.

Daniel Radcliffe and Dane DeHaan Kill Your Darlings photo: Sony Pictures Classics.