Daniel Radcliffe opens up about alcohol problems

Alcohol abuse can affect anybody. This week Daniel Radcliffe, most famous for playing Harry Potter from the age of 11, admitted that he developed a serious alcohol problem. He managed to quit drinking completely in 2010.

Radcliffe turned to alcohol for the same reason that most people do ‒ he was afraid of failure and found his work-life situation very stressful. He used alcohol as a way to cope with the huge pressures he was finding himself facing.

He said: “I was living in constant fear of who I’d meet, what I might have said to them, what I might have done with them, so I’d stay in my apartment for days and drink alone. I was a recluse at 20. It was pathetic – it wasn’t me. I’m a fun, polite person, and it turned me into a rude bore.”

Radcliffe explained how by the age of 20 he had become a virtual recluse. His drink problem started when he was still filming Harry Potter and in an interview he said that he would often be drunk on set in the morning following a heavy night of drinking.

He was afraid that his career would not survive after Harry Potter, which contributed to his drinking problem. It was only when he found some new roles after Harry Potter that he could accept that his acting career did not end with the final film.

The Harry Potter seriestook up ten years of Radcliffe’s life during the most important time of his emotional and physical development.

He told the Mirror that he really would have been better off without the alcohol, saying: “It was not making me as happy as I wanted it to.”

Alcohol does not discriminate between the rich and poor, or the successful and failures. If drinking gets out of hand and you start to abuse alcohol, it will become a serious problem. Radcliffe was lucky that he identified his problem and chose to take action.