Daniel Radcliffe gives candid response when asked why he doesn’t have social media

Daniel Radcliffe has revealed he doesn’t use social media because he wants to protect his mental health.

During a new interview with Rolling Stone, published Thursday, the 36-year-old Harry Potter actor was asked if he ever feels like he’s “missing out” because he doesn’t post or consume content on social media.

“Literally never,” Radcliffe responded.

“I’m not on Instagram. I’m not on any of the Twitter versions that exist. I don’t know how anyone does it,” he continued. “Honestly, it seems so stressful. I’m stressed enough. I don’t think that would do wonders for my mental health.”

During the interview, he was in the midst of rehearsals for his new, one-man Broadway show, Every Brilliant Thing, which opens at the Hudson Theatre on March 12.

“I was just in our rehearsal room, and everyone was having a conversation about bricks or apps that keep them off their phone,” he said.

While he said he still uses the internet, Radcliffe stays far away from social media apps.

“I’m sure this is going to be the thing that when my son is older [will] make him think of me as unspeakably old and decrepit. But yeah, I can’t do it,” he added.

Radcliffe and his wife, Erin Darke, share a two-year-old son whose name has not yet been publicly revealed.

The Merrily We Roll Along star has been adamant about avoiding social media before. During a 2020 appearance on First We Feast, he explained why he chose not to join X, formerly known as Twitter, because he thought he might have been baited into heated arguments with other people.

“I would love to say there's some sort of intellectual, well-thought-out reason for this because I considered getting a Twitter,” he told Hot Ones host Sean Evans at the time. “And I 100 percent know that if I did, you all would be waking up to stories like, 'Dan Radcliffe gets into fight with random person on Twitter.’”

“When I was younger, not anymore thank God, I would like to look up comments about myself on the internet and read s*** like that,” he recalled. “That is an insane and bad thing to do. And to me, like Twitter and everything just sort of feels like an extension of that. Unless I'm going to go on to just read all nice things about myself, which also feels like another kind of unhealthy thing to do.”

He also noted that he wasn’t “mentally strong enough” to have his own social media accounts, and he was “all right with that.”