Daniel Radcliffe could spend the rest of his life sitting by a pool doing nothing but collecting checks from his Harry Potter work and nobody would really blame him. That sprawling franchise consumed his childhood; it'd be all right if he took some time off to enjoy his adulthood.

That's not what Radcliffe is doing, though. He's throwing himself headfirst into more acting work, taking on unique, challenging roles. This year alone he's played an FBI agent who goes undercover as a white supremacist (Imperium) and a dead body with miraculous powers (Swiss Army Man). But he may just top both of them in 2017 thanks to an under-the-radar movie called Jungle.

Fandango spoke to Jungle director Greg McLean (The Darkness) about the project, which completed filming in Colombia earlier this week. As it turns out, it's based on the true story of a group of friends in 1981 who were lured into the Amazon rainforest by a man claiming to be a geologist who knew of a remote village rich in gold. The man ended up being a fraud, and the friends wound up stuck deep in the jungle with no resources and no means of getting back to civilization. The group was eventually split up, with one of them spending nearly a month on his own as he tried to survive the wilderness.

Radcliffe plays that lone adventurer (the real life Yossi Ghinsberg), and as McLean told us, "Daniel goes through a really incredible transformation in the film. It's an extraordinary performance. He really went for it. I'm talking 21 days pretty much by himself in the Amazon jungle. It's an amazing transformation, physically and psychologically."

If you've seen Swiss Army Man, you're probably already familiar with how committed Radcliffe can be under harsh conditions. He'll be up against a similarly ridiculous environment in Jungle, but McLean explains it never seemed to bother his star. "One day we were shooting a scene, sitting in the mosquito-infested swamps of Colombia just chatting away. I asked him to do a particular series of thoughts that the character was having, a few very different things all in a row, and it was just so complex what he was doing. I was like, 'Dude, you're like a Ferrari. You're going 200 miles per hour and then you realize you've got 8 more gears you can do.'"

As of right now Jungle doesn't have an official release date, but you can expect to see it sometime in 2017.