Movie News

Radcliffe beats off Bloom and Ledger to land coveted role

Wed 02 Jan 11:20 AM

Harry Potter star Daniel Radcliffe has beaten off competition from A-list acting talents Heath Ledger and Orlando Bloom to star in the biopic of a slain journalist.

Radcliffe will play photojournalist Dan Eldon in Journey, which tells the story of his exploits when covering the civil war in Somalia in 1993. Tragedy strikes when he and three other journalists are stoned to death by a mob after they start taking pictures of a recently bombed building.

Radcliffe's casting has even got the approval of Eldon's mother Kathy, who said: "We resisted a lot of older actors because Dan was a boy emerging into manhood."

It's the latest in a series of moves by Radcliffe, who also posed naked on stage in 2007 in the play Equus, in a bid to avoid being typecast following the huge success of the Harry Potter films.