Why Daniel Radcliffe Missed Out On Being In Everything Everywhere All At Once

After cutting their teeth on some of the wildest music videos in recent memory, directing duo Daniel Kwan and Daniel Scheinert (aka Daniels) made their feature-length debut in 2016 with "Swiss Army Man." Better known as the movie where Daniel Radcliffe plays a farting corpse, the film stars Paul Dano as a man marooned on an island who finds a surprising friend in the shape of, you guessed it, a dead man portrayed by the Boy Who Lived. Dano then proceeds to employ his newfound companion for a variety of purposes, like using a very specific body part as a compass, all the while teaching him about the joys of being alive and even kissing him at one point. It's a deeply weird yet deeply melancholic and otherwise moving film.

How do you even top a feature-length debut like that? If you're Daniels, you reunite to go and make "Everything Everywhere All At Once," a multiversal epic where Michelle Yeoh plays a Chinese-American woman who must connect with her alternate lives in order to save all of reality (er, realities). Like "Swiss Army Man," the movie is filled with discordant elements that somehow work in harmony with one another, from bizarre cameos to a parallel universe where people have evolved to have hot dog hands. It also very nearly featured Radcliffe in a supporting role before he was forced to take a pass by that all-too-common enemy of the prolific character actor: a scheduling conflict.

Despite missing out on a Daniels reunion, Radcliffe can currently be seen in theaters playing a treasure-hunting billionaire in "The Lost City" and revisiting his old Wizarding World pals in the HBO Max streaming special "Harry Potter 20th Anniversary: Return to Hogwarts." In an interview with Empire about his recent projects, he admitted he came very close to re-teaming with Daniels on "Everything Everywhere All At Once" before having to bow out due to a play. That said, he's more than happy to see how well the film is doing without him:

"I'm so excited. It's the best. At one point they were trying to get me in for it, and I was doing a play, so I could not be there, which I'm still gutted about. They are probably the only people in the world that I would say yes to doing a movie of theirs without even seeing the script. If they want me in something, I know that it will be for a reason and that if they're making something, it's because they have found something amazing to make. So yeah, I would follow those guys to the ends of the earth, really."

Every the busy artist, Radcliffe only just barely finished filming his role as world-famous music parodist "Weird Al" Yankovic in the Roku Channel biopic "Weird: The Al Yankovic Story." In a separate interview on the Empire Podcast, he also revealed he's written a script that he wants to try his hand at directing, before warning it's still a ways off:

"I've got an idea for something that I have written. I'm hopefully going to direct. It will be in a couple of years' time, because the next 18 months at least are pretty much accounted for already..."

Will he have time for a reunion with Daniels between now and then? The directors have yet to reveal their plans for the future (best to give them a moment to breathe first), but if there's anything their career has proven so far, it's that you never know exactly what they're going to get up to next.

"Everything Everywhere All At Once" is now playing in theaters.