Caroline Preece has more than 15 years of experience writing entertainment content. Her work for outlets including Den of Geek, Backstage, Tom’s Guide, CultBox, and Starburst prioritizes sharp analysis and reader-first reporting with a particular interest in the ways storytelling, audience behavior, and digital culture drive modern entertainment trends.
A decade and a half after he stopped playing the most famous boy wizard in the world, Daniel Radcliffe has built a second act out of refusing the safe option, and his next role leans about as far from Hogwarts as it gets. The independent Vietnam War thriller he signed onto last year has finally found the actor who will share most of its screen time with him, and the two already have history.
Trust the Man comes from writer-director Will Graham, co-showrunner of Amazon's Daisy Jones & the Six, who is producing through his Invitation Media banner alongside Tonia Davis and Max Linsky. The new actor steps into a role that stalled once before, with Deadline reporting that Lucas Hedges was originally set to star opposite Radcliffe before scheduling conflicts pulled him out.
Jonathan Groff has now closed a deal to star opposite Radcliffe in Trust the Man. It marks the pair's first screen project together after their Tony-winning turn in the Broadway revival of Stephen Sondheim's Merrily We Roll Along, where Groff won lead actor in a musical and Radcliffe took the featured prize.
The story drops both men into a tense two-hander. Radcliffe plays an ambitious Army Intelligence officer assigned to investigate a decorated soldier with a mysterious past, and as surveillance and interrogation wear on, the line between duty and obsession blurs. No word yet on which of the leads Groff will play, though the script's reliance on a single charged relationship means it may all rest on whether these two can hold the screen against each other.
Groff has the right back catalog for a psychological pressure-cooker. His FBI profiler, Holden Ford, in David Fincher's Mindhunter remains one of the sharpest studies of an investigator whose fascination with his subjects curdles into something darker, and he also showed a harder, more physical edge as Agent Smith in The Matrix Resurrections – useful range for a story like this.
Radcliffe, meanwhile, has spent his post-Potter career chasing roles that complicate the boy-wizard image, from the prison-break thriller Escape from Pretoria to a recent NBC mockumentary sitcom. HBO is also building a decade-long Harry Potter television reboot, with Radcliffe sending a supportive letter to Dominic McLaughlin, the young actor taking over as Harry, making clear he wants the new cast to work free of his shadow.
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Both actors are coming off well-received solo Broadway runs, Groff in the Bobby Darin musical Just in Time and Radcliffe in the one-man show Every Brilliant Thing, and Groff heads next to a Royal Shakespeare Company turn as Rosalind in an all-male staging of As You Like It. The more immediate question is who Groff is actually playing, and whether Graham keeps the reunion's charge intact once the songs are gone.