Welcome to BAM! POW! ZAP!’s inaugural All Grown-up Edition, in which we hear from Hogwarts alum and faculty alike, as well as one of the Office of Superspies’ youngest recruits who discusses being an adult in a fanboy/fangirl world.

From Gryffindor to Ginsberg: Daniel Radcliffe

“I certainly don't assume that because I've got a famous face at the moment that that guarantees me anything,” says Daniel Radcliffe, recognizing that his Harry Potter resume doesn’t mean he won’t need to audition for the roles he craves. “So I fight and work just as hard as anyone else, I think, to get those parts I really care about.”

The latest role that the 24-year-old actor’s gone to the mat for was that of poet Allen Ginsberg in the indie film Kill Your Darlings, director John Krokidas’ Sundance smash that chronicles a long forgotten murder among the Beat Generation icons of the 1950s. "Allen's poetry, particularly, becomes a lot more emotionally involving if you actually know about his real life.” Reading Ginsberg’s diaries, Radcliffe found the poet “somebody who was incredibly aware of their own intelligence and very proud of it, but at the same time was very insecure and kind of awkward socially.”

The film includes a much-ballyhooed gay sex scene between Ginsberg and writer Lucien Carr (Dane DeHaan) that Radcliffe has said is no big deal. He told Katie Couric earlier this week that "It's quite an easy headline, I guess… there's a lot of jokes to be made." (Last week costar DeHaan told E! News that Daniel is a "great kisser," so there you go.)

Radcliffe says the more diverse a post-Hogwarts filmography he can assemble, the happier he’ll be. “If there's a philosophy or strategy, it’s don't repeat yourself."

To that end, he’s next taking on the role of the hunchbacked lab assistant Igor in a trope-tweaking new iteration of Frankenstein opposite James McAvoy as the boundary-testing scientist. “Igor is really being given more of a backstory than ever seen before,” says Radcliffe. “He's highly intelligent and plays a huge part in Frankenstein's dilemma and the solving – it's a much more equal partnership than we've seen in the past, I'd say.”

Meanwhile, he’s just as thrilled as the rest of the legions of Harry Potter fans to learn of author J.K. Rowling’s plan to turn the in-book text Fantastic Beasts and Where to Find Them into a spin-off film franchise. “There are so many people out there who have this real hunger for the continuing expansion of the Potter universe. And now that Jo has had success away from Potter with The Casual Vacancy and Cuckoo's Calling, I think she can obviously step back to it with confidence.”

 

Spy Curves: Alexa Vega

Alexa Vega, 25, admits that while she’s happy to finally have graduated from her squeaky-clean Spy Kids image as Carmen Cortez to a skimpy-lingerie-clad badass named KillJoy in Machete Kills, she never expected the seismic impact her new sexpot image would have. “It was definitely unexpected, to say the least,” Vega admits, crediting director Robert Rodriguez for the makeover.

“We set out to try to change people's minds because they only see you as a kid because they grow up with those movies,” she explains. “[People] were very welcoming to it – I think because we aren't taking ourselves seriously. It's a crazy, fun movie, it empowers women, and Robert shoots all of his women very, very well – the lighting, the outfits, they're all pretty awesome. So if I was ever going to play this kind of role, I trusted Robert with that.”

“I love transformations,” says Rodriguez, who first began working with Vega when she was 12. “I really love taking actors and having them play a role they don’t usually get to play. When I first worked with George Clooney he was SO good at playing that nice doctor on TV, he wasn’t getting any movie role offers, so I made him a killer [in From Dusk Till Dawn], like, 180 degrees, and then he got all kinds of stuff. Carla Gugino, she was only 28 when she did Spy Kids but she got labeled as this mother type, and she had trouble getting any kind of other offer, so I put her in Sin City and it changed her career.

“Alexa called me and said ‘I’m really having trouble getting more grown-up roles – I’m still getting 16, 17, 18-year-old parts, and I’m 25!’” recalls the director. “She said ‘If you ever have a Sin City-type thing, could you think of me for some of those roles?’ And I said ‘Wow, that would never happen. No one’s ever gonna cast her – there’s too much baggage.’ And then I realized I was part of the problem. And the only person who could lift her from that curse was the one who put it on her to begin with."

Rodriguez invited her to join the cast of Machete Kills as one of Sofia Vergara’s gang of prostitutes/enforcers, believing it would take baby steps to ease both the audience and the actress into a more mature image. “She just went for it! Stood front and center, got the craziest outfits and put herself right out there with so much confidence, and I think the first photo that went out from the set changed everyone’s mind immediately.”

“So much for baby steps!” laughs Vega. “Being on set with [Robert’s crew] was like being on set with, like, 60 parents, because I had grown up with them. And I knew that if I could convince these guys that I was capable of playing a more grown-up role, then America would be the easy part, because they’re more protective of me than anyone.”

 

Punk Professor: Alan Rickman

Another Harry Potter alum, Alan Rickman, had a very visceral experience watching one of his former young costars at work as an adult when he shared the screen with Rupert Grint in CBGB, a film about the New York bar that became the birthplace of punk rock. “I’m looking at somebody I’ve known since he was 12, innocent and wide-eyed,” Rickman says, “and there he is wearing his hair gelled vertical and his lip curled and wearing a black leather belt around his neck with spikes. So there you think ‘Well, there you go – we’ve moved on.’ Good for him.”

Grint plays Dead Boys guitarist Cheetah Chrome to Rickman’s Hilly Kristal, the unlikely impresario who founded CBGB where the Ramones, Blondie, Talking Heads, Iggy Pop and the Police got started in the late '70s and early '80s. “Hilly’s got a kind of heroism,” says Rickman of the man who culled his bar’s initials from the music he planned to feature – Country, BlueGrass and Blues – only to embrace a wholly original new genre. “In the middle of all that noise there was actually a quiet, thoughtful soul who read lots of books, and the people who knew him said he was kind of a quiet mountain in the middle of all that mayhem.”

 

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