Daniel Radcliffe's most unconventional film role is about to become free to watch. Swiss Army Man, the 2016 A24 feature in which Radcliffe plays a flatulent corpse who befriends a stranded man on a deserted island, begins streaming on Plex on September 1.
The film marked the feature directorial debut of Daniel Scheinert and Daniel Kwan, the filmmaking duo known as the Daniels. They would later win seven Academy Awards for Everything Everywhere All At Once. Swiss Army Man was their first feature, and it announced them as a singular creative force.
According to Collider, the film stars Paul Dano as Hank, a hopeless castaway who discovers Radcliffe's dead body washed ashore and uses it, in increasingly surreal ways, to survive. The premise sounds absurd because it is, but the film earned a devoted following and considerable critical respect after its Sundance premiere, where audiences reportedly walked out and then returned to buy tickets again.
For Radcliffe, the role represented one of the boldest steps away from Harry Potter in a post-franchise career full of them. He has since appeared in Guns Akimbo, The Lost City, and Weird: The Al Yankovic Story, among other projects. But Swiss Army Man remains perhaps the sharpest illustration of how deliberately he has pursued strange and challenging material.
The film joins Plex's catalog of free movies at a moment when interest in Radcliffe is building again. The first trailer for the new Harry Potter HBO series earned 277 million organic views in 48 hours, breaking a record for the network. The show's first episode is less than four months away. For anyone looking to revisit what Radcliffe has done in the years since Hogwarts, Swiss Army Man is a strong place to start, and starting September 1, it costs nothing.
