Daniel Radcliffe Goes Undercover as a Skinhead in First 'Imperium' Trailer
With Harry Potter now in his rearview mirror — although never say never! — Daniel Radcliffe has set about amassing one of cinema’s most interesting and diverse bodies of work, including wildly different recent turns as a villain in Now You See Me 2 and a farting corpse in Swiss Army Man. Come this August, he’ll travel even further down that transformational path when he plays an undercover agent posing as a white supremacist. Now we have a first look at his neo-Nazi saga above.
Related: A Deep Dive Into Daniel Radcliffe’s Eclectic Post-’Harry Potter’ Career
In Imperium, Radcliffe plays Nate Foster, a young FBI agent who’s assigned by his boss (Toni Colette) to infiltrate a gang of skinheads. To do this, he shaves his head, gets some white-power tattoos, and straps on his jack boots to become a member of a local National Socialist outfit led by The Knick’s burly Chris Sullivan. No matter that, as he claims in the film’s debut trailer, he isn’t experienced (or tough) enough for this assignment; in director Daniel Ragussis’ film, Radcliffe’s cop is thrust head-first into the lion’s den, where he discovers, unsurprisingly, that neo-Nazis are scarily intolerant folks with a lust for violence and plans for a domestic terrorist attack.
Resembling the offspring of American History X and Donnie Brasco, Imperium has the makings of a tense and timely thriller when it arrives in theaters Aug. 19. To get a glimpse of the former boy wizard posing as a Hitler-loving racist, check out the film’s premiere trailer above.
