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By Rob Payne | Trade News | November 30, 2011 | Comments ()

First he waved his wand in front of God and everybody through eight blockbuster movies, then he had nightly sex with a horse on Broadway, and now he’s apparently working out a deal to play Buddhist anti-consumerist beat poet Allen Ginsberg. Daniel Radcliffe clearly just enjoys inflaming the righteous ire of the busy-bodies who see the devil in everything, and especially in the work of actors playing fictionalized magicians. It’s like he gets off on endlessly giving them grist for their ignorant hate mill. Lest we forget his hyper-self-aware cameo in Ricky Gervais’s “Extras” at the zenith of his Harry Potter fame. Daniel Radcliffe just seems determined to piss of the squares, man.

That, or, you know, he’s really giving this whole acting thing a go and not resting on his laurels. Or his pile of galleons.

In movies, at least, Radcliffe has been rather light weight up to this point, turning in competent but not exactly electrifying performances, so it will be interesting to see if he can pull off such a unique persona as Allen Ginsberg, and from a script as enticing as Kill Your Darlings sounds. The role is especially intriguing in that Radcliffe will be replacing Jesse Eisenberg, who was originally set to co-star with Chris Evans, in a portrayal of Ginsberg meeting his fellow beatnik Jack Kerouac in 1944, a decade before the former had composed “Howl.” The film will also detail the murder of David Kammerer, the lover of Ginsberg’s and Kerouac’s mutual friend Lucien Carr, and is being billed as a thriller. Admittedly, it could simply be the hepcat version of The Raven, starring liberal wingnut John Cusack. But if Radcliffe can pull off something besides gritted teeth intensity (and if they find someone else besides Chris “Captain America” Evans as Kerouac), this could be the launching pad he needs to move beyond The Boy Who Lived.

So… I’mma let you finish, D-Rad, but David Cross had the best Allen Ginsberg performance of all time:

Rob Payne also writes the indie comic The Unstoppable Force, tweets on the Twitter @RobOfWar, and some of his wares can be purchased here. He accidentally saw Harry Potter’s flesh-wand when searching for the header image, which now puts Radcliffe between Bacon and Ribisi in a mental file he wishes he never had, and that no amount of chemical substances can erase.

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