Daniel Radcliffe‘s career has been fascinating to follow since he played his career-defining role for the last time a decade ago in Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows – Part 2. He could have easily spent the rest of his days coasting on the success of the iconic pop culture behemoth, but he’s actively challenged himself at every turn, and as a result, the 31 year-old has to be regarded as one of the most versatile and exciting young talents in the business.
He was a farting corpse in Swiss Army Man, an FBI agent undercover with white supremacists in Imperium, a cocaine smuggling pilot in Beast of Burden, a South African political prisoner in Escape from Pretoria and a computer programmer with guns bolted to his hands forced to battle to the death for people’s entertainment in Guns Akimbo, none of which are the sort of roles you’d expect to see from the former Boy Who Lived.
However, one of Radcliffe’s very best performances came in biographical dramatic thriller Jungle back in 2017. Directed by horror veteran Greg McLean, Radcliffe stars as Yossi Ghinsberg, an intrepid young Israeli adventurer who becomes stranded deep in the Amazon rainforest after being led straight into danger, getting hopelessly and dangerously lost.
The best way to describe Jungle would be as a companion piece to Danny Boyle’s 127 Hours given the narrative and thematic similarities, not to mention one particularly grisly scene that some viewers might not have the stomach for. It veers into standard biopic melodrama on occasion, but Daniel Radcliffe is never anything less than magnetic, and his residual Harry Potter popularity has made people more willing to check out his independent work, causing Jungle to find a very big audience on Amazon Prime Video this week.