Harry Potter: Daniel Radcliffe Broke Wands Every Three Weeks While Filming

Daniel Radcliffe has been in the public eye for a long time thanks to being the titular hero of the Harry Potter film franchise. The actor worked on the series from the time he was 13 until he was 21, and though he’s left it in the rear view mirror for some time now he’s been very open about the fun that he had growing up on those sets. Speaking in a new interview on Hot Ones, Radcliffe was asked about reports that he’d broken/destroyed a lot of the wands and pairs of glasses while making the film, the actor confirmed that the numbers were too high but he did crack a lot of wands.

“I would definitely say they are exaggerated, the glasses one massively so,” Radcliffe said to the quoted number of “70 wands and 160 glasses.” “I definitely didn’t break the glasses that often, at all I don’t think. The wands I definitely broke a lot because I would just like drum on my legs with it all the time, and do that incessantly and so probably like once every like three or four weeks it would just weaken to the point where it snapped. Then I would say I was very sorry to the prop master and he would give me a look like ‘Please, stop drumming.’ They were very, very sweet with us and tolerated more than I hope they would from an adult actor.”

Radcliffe also shared a NSFW story about his time on set, recounting a time when a scene in Professor McGonagall’s classroom featured a ton of animals, one of whom did some inappropriate behavior.

“Debating whether, no, I have to tell this story,” Radcliffe said. “You’ve asked about such a specific thing in that McGonagall classroom, there were a lot of animals first of all to address that part of the question. They must have had upwards of sixty there. I don’t imagine they were often all on set together but definitely in that scene in the transfiguration classroom there was a monkey of some kind in a cage that did just start jerking off relentlessly. But general speaking the animals were very well behaved. Although I think Rupert maybe got peed on by a bat as well. I got away pretty cleanly after that.”

The eight Harry Potter movies aren’t streaming anywhere for the first time in a while, but are part of the rotating content that appears on HBO Max from time to time.