Daniel Radcliffe wasn’t sure how to prep for all the convulsing and limb-twisting required to play the flatulent corpse in “Swiss Army Man.”
So he’d send the directors videos of himself crawling across his apartment, wriggling on the carpet and falling down, and ask, “Is this it?”
“I feel like all I came to set with was just a willingness to be thrown around and to contort and just … make things look as painful and uncomfortable as possible,” Radcliffe, 26, told the Daily News. “I was like, ‘That’s what I’m bringing to the party.'”
The surreal buddy comedy, which opened in New York on Friday, begins with desert island-marooned Hank (Paul Dano) about to hang himself when Radcliffe’s Manny — fitted in a crisp suit and farting his dead little heart out — washes up on shore.
Manny, who grows progressively more lifelike and self-aware over the indie film’s 95 minutes, helps the loner confront his insecurities. Hank, in turn, finds his pale new pal is equal parts friend and survival tool — at various points riding him like a Jet Ski, using his penis as a compass, chopping wood with his arm and kindling fire with his farts.
“Paul and I were definitely game immediately from the word ‘go,'” Radcliffe said. “I think we were both very aware early on, like, ‘Oh, we’re gonna get very close physically in this film.'”
But he didn’t find any of his gassy, cringe-worthy feats “particularly embarrassing” — a lack of inhibition that impressed writing-directing duo Daniel Scheinert and Daniel Kwan.
The two, jointly billed as “the Daniels,” fondly recalled a take in which they’d had Radcliffe bare his butt on camera.
“We brought Dan over to the monitor and we were like, ‘Do you want us to delete this?’ ’cause the shot showed more butt than we thought,” Scheinert told The News. “And he was like, ‘No, that’s the movie. I trust you.'”
The film, of course, is not for the faint of fart. It prompted a slew of walkouts at this year’s Sundance Film Festival, earned mixed reviews, and has the polarizing distinction of having been dubbed “the Daniel Radcliffe farting boner corpse movie.”
“There’s no part of me that wants to shy away from that, because it has those moments and those things,” Radcliffe said. “And also, frankly, that’s what a lot of people know it as now, and that’s not entirely without its value.”
But the three Daniels point out that the body humor-heavy film also teems with tender moments.
“The goal is to make something beautiful out of something you would never expect to be,” Kwan said. “I guess that probably won’t appeal to most people, but for the weirdos who are just excited about something special, I think that that’s who we made it for, anyways.”
After his career-defining turn as teen wizard Harry Potter in eight films over 10 years, Radcliffe has eagerly shown range in recent movies like the Allen Ginsberg biopic “Kill Your Darlings,” the rom-com “What If” and the horror flick “The Woman in Black.”
And so The Boy Who Lived jumped at this chance to play dead.
“(When the last Harry Potter movie was coming out), if someone could tell me that in five years’ time I would’ve been able to make films like this, I just would’ve never believed them,” Radcliffe said. “I would’ve been so happy.”
