Daniel Radcliffe, Mariska Hargitay and the Happiest List on Earth

The Daily

The New York Times

News, Daily News

4.3 • 107.6K Ratings

🗓️ 26 April 2026

⏱️ 41 minutes

🔗️ Recording | iTunes | RSS

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Summary

With war, political wrangling and price hikes jockeying for headlines, it’s a rare thing to sit for an hour with a large group of strangers and focus on the small pleasures in life. But that’s what the show “Every Brilliant Thing” is all about. Since 2013, Duncan Macmillan’s audience-participation-heavy play has been performed in dozens of languages in hundreds of locations across the globe. It revolves around a central character who writes a list of all the good things in life for a depressed parent. And while it tackles dark subject matter — including frequent mentions of a loved one’s suicide — it may be one of the funniest shows about depression, ever. In this episode of “The Sunday Daily,” Michael Barbaro talks with Daniel Radcliffe, who currently stars in a Broadway production of the show, and Mariska Hargitay, who will step into the role in a few weeks. We’ll also hear from the playwright and several other actors who have performed the play on stages, in living rooms, on basketball courts and aircraft carriers all over the world.

Transcript

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0:00.0	From New York Times, I'm Michael Barrow. This is the Daily on Sunday.
0:08.7	The general heaviness of this moment, the war, the prices, the AI, is not lost on any of us. We cover it every day on this show.
0:20.3	Joy and relief, I think it's fair to say,
0:22.9	are rare. But a few weeks ago, I found myself genuinely awash in both of those feelings.
0:30.9	I had just left a theater in Midtown Manhattan, where I had seen something unlike
0:36.1	anything I'd ever seen before,
0:38.9	a show that insists on creating a new kind of filter,
0:44.4	a happier filter, a filter through which ordinary everyday occurrences
0:50.7	literally become a reason to live.
0:55.3	The list began after her first attempt, a list of everything brilliant about the world.
1:01.9	Everything Worth.
1:02.8	The show is called Every Brilliant Thing.
1:06.3	It just opened up on Broadway, starring Daniel Radcliffe.
1:10.6	In it, Radcliffe asks us the audience to work together
1:14.5	with him to tell the play's central story. One. Ice cream. Two. Waterlights. Three. More on that in just a moment.
1:26.2	It turns out, I was relatively late to the phenomenon of this show,
1:30.6	which has become a kind of global antidote to paint him.
1:35.8	It's been translated into dozens of languages.
1:38.2	It's been produced in hundreds of communities around the world.
1:41.8	In places like Dublin?
1:43.7	The list began after her first attempt.
1:46.0	Tokyo?
	...

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