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Daniel Radcliffe Turned to Alcohol to Cope With The Ending of Harry Potter

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Daniel Radcliffe, the British actor best known for his role in the Harry Potter movie series, admitted that he turned to alcohol when the record-setting franchise was coming to a close. (Getty Images)

‘”There was definitely a time when I was coming out of Potter into the real world, and suddenly I was in a world when I was not in that consistency anymore,” he stated during an interview on Marc Maron’s WTF podcast. “I was living alone, and I think I was really freaked out… I drank a lot, as has been recorded, but I think that was more to do with going out in public and having a battle within me of thinking, ‘No I can have a totally normal life.’”

The 26-year-old performer, who was cast as the boy wizard when he was just 10, stated that he has been sober since 2013, explaining, “You get bored waking up feeling like that.”

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Related: It’s Official: A Lot of Us Have a Drinking Problem

Radcliffe went on to roles in the movies The Woman in Black and Kill Your Darlings and on Broadway in The Cripple of Inishmaan, and expressed gratitude for his continued success. “I was very lucky that people gave me opportunities directly after Potter finished to play more grown up stuff, because I could have been getting teen offer type stuff,” he said.

However, this isn’t the first time the actor, who is now sober, has discussed his out of control drinking. Back in 2012, he told the magazine Heat that alcohol was leading him down a dangerous path, where he was showing up to work still drunk from the night before. “People with problems like that are very adept at hiding it,” he told the celebrity publication. “It was bad. I don’t want to go into details, but I drank a lot and it was daily—I mean nightly.”

Related: Am I an Alcoholic? How To Tell If You’re Drinking

“Sometimes certain events trigger certain addictions, because addiction is a way to not feel what’s uncomfortable,” says Dr. Robi Ludwig, a psychotherapist, TV news commentator and contributor to Investigative Discovery’s Scorned.
She adds that the timing of Radcliffe’s drinking issue “makes sense, especially since this an actor and his whole identity, in a sense, revolved around this character and this movie. It brings up a lot of pain.”

Ludwig says it’s likely that Radcliffe, who stars in the upcoming movies Victor Frankenstein and Now You See Me 2, asked himself some difficult questions, such as, What’s next? Is my career really over at this point? Who am I? Will people only want me if I’m doing this role?

“The bottom line is people don’t like change, especially when it’s connected to endings,” she concludes. “For some people, they have a harder time maintaining a positive self-image when it’s linked to a job that gives them an identity. And so in order to deal with the intensity of that emotional pain, some people self-medicate in order to feel less depressed, less anxious, less hopeless or less unimportant.”

Read This Next: What Happens to Your Body Within an Hour of Drinking a Beer

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