Although it wouldn’t be his first time straying from the Harry Potter roll that made him so unbelievably famous, Daniel Radcliffe is taking some time away, yet again, from Hogwarts and wizardry to attempt his most challenging roll yet.
According to reports from the New York Times, the 18 year old actor has been cast to play the very serious and powerful roll of Dan Eldon, the 22 year old journalist would was stoned to death covering the tension in Somalia.
Eldon, a photojournalist, was fluent in Swahili and Somali, and was employed by the news resource Reuters during the time of Somalia’s civil war. Eldon and three other journalists were attempting to capture images of the aftermath result of the American-led attack on Mogadishu when they were stoned by a mob of locals.
It is quite a leap from the likes of the Potter films, but even Eldon’s own mother, Kathy, believes that young Daniel Radcliffe is more than ready to make the transition from sorcery to Somalia.
“He has portrayed a magician for years, and my Dan was a different kind of magician,” she told the Guardian, a U.K. paper. “There are parallels in the two Dans’ lives. Daniel Radcliffe is a poet, he keeps journals and he’s half-Jewish. He has a puckishness, sense of humour and energy inside him, which remind me of Dan.”
