"Harry Potter" star Daniel Radcliffe is raising some eyebrows with his decision to drop his drawers on a London stage.
"Nude?" asked Nedra Jones, 27, a model from Harlem.
"Not the little, quiet guy!" said Roland Conyers, 39, a New Jersey hair stylist who was shopping with her yesterday at a Border's bookstore near Madison Square Garden.
Radcliffe, the 17-year-old star of the "Harry Potter" movies, said recently he will make his London stage debut next year in the acclaimed drama "Equus", in which he'll appear for one scene in the buff.
Radcliffe says he wanted to show audiences that he can do more than the beloved bespectacled magician that he first began playing when he was 10, he told Newsweek for its Oct. 30 issue.
"Part of me wants to shake up people's perception of me, just shove me in a blender," Radcliffe said in an interview on the set of the fifth film, "Harry Potter and the Order of the Phoenix," to be released next summer. "It's a really challenging play, and if I can pull it off - we don't know if I can yet - I hope people will stop and think, 'Maybe he can do something other than Harry.'"
Jones said she thought Radcliffe was making the right call. If he didn't take the role, she said, fans "won't be able to separate him from Harry Potter."
"I think it's going to take his career to the next level," Conyers added.
In the Tony-winning "Equus," which is set to open in February, Radcliffe plays a character who has an erotic obsession with horses and in the scene in question sits atop a horse naked.
Just the thought has teen girls aglow.
"A sensational nude scene??? MUST GET THE DIRTY THOUGHTS OUT OF MY HEAD!!" a lass from Northern Ireland wrote on a British Web site for Radcliffe fans.
Wrote the forum's administrator, "99% of the young girls e-mailing me about it, or talking about it, are under the impression that they will just go to see Dan nude."
Originally published on October 23, 2006
