It isn’t easy being a child star. That’s something history has proven time and time again, and there’s a reason why a substance-abusing former child star is a cliché. Luckily, in the case of the Harry Potter franchise, it looks like all the child stars have avoided most of the pitfalls that come with being a child star (at least in the long term), but that’s not to say there weren’t some problems along the way.

Harry Potter himself, Daniel Radcliffe, has always been very open about his alcohol abuse problems in the past, and has even pointed to specific scenes he filmed where he knows he was drunk. But what was the reason he turned to alcohol in the first place? Unsurprisingly, a lot of it has to do with him feeling overly-scrutinized no matter where he goes, as he revealed to The Off Camera Show.

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“There is an awareness that I really struggled with, particularly in my late teens when I was going out to places for the first time where you would feel — again, it could have largely been in my head — where you would feel watched when you went into a bar, when you went into a pub. In my case, the quickest way to forget you were being watched was to get very drunk. Then as you get very drunk, you become aware, ‘Oh, people are watching more now because now I’m getting very drunk, so I should probably drink more to ignore that more.’ It can affect your psyche.”

Obviously, we can look at that and objectively know that drinking at these moments isn’t the best way to go about it, but humans aren’t exactly the pinnacle of rational beings, are they? It continues to be pretty refreshing to see Radcliffe’s candidness when discussing his past actions offscreen, so I recommend checking the full interview above if you have time.

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SOURCE: The Off Camera Show (via Cinema Blend)