It’s early afternoon in a midtown rehearsal room, Daniel Radcliffe is in need of a volunteer from his audience, and I’m the only person around who hasn’t seen the play before. “Would you mind playing a lecturer?” he says as he approaches me. “You just really look like him.” I’m brought to the center of the room, handed a copy of The Sorrows of Young Werther, and told to extemporize a synopsis of the novel — that seems impossible until Radcliffe points out the large-font text on the back of the prop book with everything I need to say. He interrupts me a few times in character; he’s playing an eager college student trying to process the book’s depiction of depression and suicide.
Soon, Radcliffe’s character, known only as “performer” in the script, races out of the lecture with new ideas on his mind and gently escorts me back to the seat in time for the transition to the next beat. He and his directors, Duncan Macmillan and Jeremy Herrin, pause the rehearsal and go over a few notes — a curse word that slipped in when it shouldn’t have, a better way to hand off the copy of Werther. “I’ve got to work on coming up with quick descriptions,” Radcliffe says regarding the people he’s planning to approach during his performances. “You’re just wearing nice normal clothes, but I’ll be looking for somebody wearing something slightly crazy.”
The audience interaction is central to Every Brilliant Thing, a play created by Macmillan and Jonny Donahoe about a man processing the experience of his mother’s attempted suicide and his own depression. Donahoe first led in Every Brilliant Thing when the play originated at the Edinburgh Fringe in 2014 and came with it to New York later that year (it’s since been revived on the West End with a series of British stars, including Sue Perkins and Minnie Driver). Now, 36-year-old Radcliffe, Harry Potter himself, will bring it to Broadway. It’s an exciting prospect, he tells me, in large part because the play’s dependence on audience volunteers gives him a way to shed his sense of being a big name and meet a lot of new people. People keep asking him if he’s nervous. He thinks it’ll be fun, especially in the period before the show begins when he mingles with the crowd and tries to set it at ease. “I think that I’m quite good at dispelling the idea that I’m a celebrity in my actual interactions,” he tells me. “So I’m hoping I’ll still be able to achieve that in a setting where we are in a theater and they have come to see me in a play.”
Lest you worry about being targeted at random, you should know that Every Brilliant Thing operates with an opt-in system. No one will be brought onstage without being asked if they’re okay with it beforehand. And Radcliffe and his team are working hard to make sure the experience is as painless and fun as possible for each volunteer while accounting for whatever unpredictable responses may play out. In one scene, he notes a beat where he could indicate an older couple in the audience holding hands by muttering an aside: “Unless they look like a couple who hates each other.” In another, he considers how to cue someone who’s been selected to play a father giving a wedding toast. If they’re fumbling for ideas, maybe tell them to “say what’s in your heart, Dad.” If they’re already confident, just let them riff.
Since so much of Every Brilliant Thing depends on the unpredictability of people’s responses, the production has spent much of its rehearsal time bringing in guinea-pig audiences of friends of Radcliffe — like a dresser he’s worked with since Equus — and the play’s staff to test things out. They’ve got a sign-up sheet going, he tells me, and since he knows those people are baseline vetted, he’s testing his limits by approaching those who look a little less comfortable and figuring out how to finesse them into playing along well. You get the sense that Radcliffe is enjoying the sort of high-intensity interval training that the dynamic requires of his stage-acting skills, which he’s been flexing hard recently. He spent a year in Merrily We Roll Along, for which he won a Tony for Best Supporting Actor in 2024, and had initially wanted to take a longer break from theater. But in talking with older actors who’d had kids, he learned how hard it would be to perform almost every night and spend time with his son (who’s now almost 3) once he was in school full time. “As I was having those conversations, I read this play for the first time, and I was just like, I want to do this,” Radcliffe says. “If you ever find something that gives you the chance to do something that you’ve never done before and will probably never be asked to do again, then that’s something you should try and do.”
Checking in with his son, Radcliffe says, has been a good way to find ballast while working on a script that, though it involves plenty of humor, deals with heavy subjects. In keeping with the play’s title, his character compiles a list of “brilliant” things that make life worth living, written on notes that his character brings out during the performance. In rehearsal, regular calls for new brilliant things are solicited from the crew (I wrote “steel-cut oatmeal”). The process has made Radcliffe mindful of the small things. “I was at the Super Bowl the other day, and there is a specific joy in watching people notice themselves on the jumbotron,” Radcliffe says, which would have made for a great brilliant thing were it not that audience members might think of the couple at the Coldplay concert instead. He’s found an even better brilliant thing recently, however, suggested by a stage manager. He won’t reveal it to me, though, because it’s now solidly part of a speech his character recites at the end of the play.
Every Brilliant Thing is in previews February 21 at the Hudson Theatre.