Radcliffe Defends Edgy Sundance Film

PARK CITY, Utah - Daniel Radcliffe's latest movie, "Kill Your Darlings," finds him playing Allen Ginsberg, the Beat area poet who falls in love with fellow writer Lucien Carr and helps him commit murder. You can't get much further from Hogwarts than that.

"It's not ' Harry Potter," he told ABC News Now's "Popcorn With Peter Travers" today. "And there's this tendency to think that I want to shock people, but this is not a shocking film. It's a beautiful film and a powerful film and an emotionally fraught one, but I don't think it's shocking."

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Radcliffe's projects outside the 'Potter' franchise have been varied. Highlights include the play "Equus," in which he appeared nude, the Broadway revival of "How to Succeed in Business Without Really Trying," and the horror flick "The Women in Black." Evolution and experimentation is normal for any actor, so he doesn't really get why people are surprised when he veers from the role of the bespectacled boy wizard.

He said hears this a lot: "'You've picked weird things!' And clearly the fact that it's in competition at Sundance means that it was a good choice."

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That said, there's a part of him that misses playing Potter. But he's glad he started branching out early.

"The early steps I took away from 'Potter,' there was always that safety net of going back to 'Potter' afterwards. I would always have another job," he said. "For a while [after 'Potter' ended, there was a bit of the sense of the oddness of knowing that I will never be doing another 'Harry Potter' film. That was a little bit sad."

But, "I made three films and a TV miniseries last year and worked with a ton of different actors and different crews," he said. "It was really just great."

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