Daniel Radcliffe plays an angel named Craig alongside Steve Buscemi’s lazy God in “Miracle Workers,” TBS’ afterlife comedy. At Variety’s Sundance Studio, Radcliffe explained what it’s like to work for the Department of Answered Prayers.
“He’s really so terrified that he’s scaled back his ambitions as an answerer of prayers that he really just deals with lost keys, lost gloves, small lost items that can be kind of easily found or revealed by blowing something off of it,” Radcliffe said of his character. “Then I meet Geraldine [Viswanathan]’s character Eliza, so she draws me out of myself. We become a team, which we then recruit Karan [Suni] onto.”
Radcliffe said he enjoys playing with the idea of heaven and the common associations surrounding it.
“Everyone has a notion of heaven growing up,” he said. “Everyone has expectations or conceptions about it that you can play with and have fun with and sort of subvert. I very much like how convoluted our heaven is.”
The afterlife comedy is a bit of a trend, and that fact is not lost on series creator Simon Rich. Both “The Good Place” and “God Friended Me” are TV shows that grapple (playfully) with the “what does it all mean” questions. So why the sudden fixation on life after death?
“There’s an existential sense of doom that has permeated the culture,” Rich said. “I think there’s a hunger for shows that to try and explain the chaos of our day to day reality. The goal was always to come up a vision of the afterlife, which is consistent with out actual day to day reality where things seem to happen randomly and horribly constantly.”
