Daniel Radcliffe: nude no more

As London Fashion Week draws to a close, it seems a good time to ask what some of the finest actors are wearing this season. And the answer appears to be: nothing. From Scarlett Johansson's copious under-the-clothes scenes in Under the Skin to Jack O'Connell tackling the tackle-out, full-frontal shot with abandon in the prison drama Starred Up, the emphasis is firmly on what not to wear. One of the common factors in many acclaimed new films is a willingness to confront nakedness without the usual strategically placed prop to spare an actor's blushes. Blue Is the Warmest Colour grabbed headlines not only for scooping the Palme d'Or at Cannes this year, but for the explicit sex scenes between its stars, Léa Seydoux and the 19-year-old newcomer Adèle Exarchopoulos. And Steve McQueen's 12 Years a Slave finds room for some blink-and-you-miss-it nudity from Chiwetel Ejiofor; that passes for restraint after McQueen's last film, Shame, where there was no limit to what viewers saw of Michael Fassbender. You might say the actor gave him an inch and McQueen took a mile.

But one brave soul has made a stand this week against derobing (well, at least his own). After back-to-back movies that have shown him without his invisibility cloak, or clothes of any sort, the Harry Potter star Daniel Radcliffe has decided to place himself back under wraps. In 2007, he appeared naked in horse obsession drama Equus, while this year alone he shot three pictures that left nothing to the imagination, including Kill Your Darlings, in which he plays the gay beat poet Allen Ginsberg. Talking about his upcoming second season of the Sky series A Young Doctor's Notebook, in which he co-stars with Mad Men's Jon Hamm, Radcliffe said: "I think there was a discussion about possible nudity for one scene and I think my comment was, 'I got naked in three films last year, please can I not?' At some point, everyone's going to start assuming I'm an exhibitionist."

The nude scene in cinema can serve any number of purposes, artistic or commercial. It can be titillating bait for otherwise unwilling viewers, or a stamp of authenticity: a kite-mark for the art-house crowd. (In fact, it can be both at once: not for nothing is there an overlap between arthouse audiences and what was once quaintly known as the "dirty mac brigade".) But for an actor, it can serve notice of a career change, a maturing.

The trouble is that Radcliffe's nudity has not yet had the desired effect on his wholesome image. A persona, after all, can be an awfully hard thing to kill off. When Julie Andrews exposed her breasts in the 1981 showbiz satire SOB, it amounted to a virtual assassination attempt on her Sound of Music image. But any hoped-for outrage simply refused to materialise. In withdrawing our peeping privileges, Radcliffe seems to have recognised that he risks being caught in a cleft stick: having gone too far in revealing himself without making the much-needed gains in credibility, he now has to relent before his nakedness becomes a running joke. It echoes the gag that Paul Kaye's spoof celebrity pest Dennis Pennis once threw at Demi Moore: if it wasn't gratuitous and it was tastefully done, might Radcliffe consider keeping his clothes on?

If it's unusual for a male star to find himself in this position, then that speaks volumes about the paucity of male nudity on our screens, at least in English-language cinema. In the 1970s and 1980s, before the advent of no-nudity clauses in contracts, the female body was essentially up for grabs: it was a given that whether it was Antonioni or Animal House, there would be ample female nudity. This left many women in a misogynistic bind in which they were punished for playing the game. The most obvious example is Helen Mirren: witness the treatment of her by Michael Parkinson during his infamous 1975 interview in which he introduces her with the words "sluttish eroticism" and goes straight into a discussion of whether her "equipment" stops her being taken seriously. "He completely denies to this day he was being sexist," she told me in 2011. "You can tell when he looks at me that there's all this interference getting in the way of what he's seeing."

Greta Scacchi is another actor whose willingness to perform nude scenes somehow worked against her. In 1991, Robert Altman tried to make her shoot nude scenes in his film The Player. She refused, and the resulting restraint was acclaimed by critics. Altman, who had instead persuaded the unknown Cynthia Stevenson to play a topless scene in the same film, spun the situation to his own benefit: he claimed he had frustrated the audience's expectations by keeping clothed the performer they had expected to see naked, while revealing the unfamiliar co-star. Such situations are neither in the past nor limited to male directors. Olivia Colman told this paper of her mortification at being shown naked in the 2006 comedy Confetti, directed by Debbie Isitt. "The betrayal was how much was going to be seen and what was going to be pixelated," she said. "I would not willingly show anybody my muff unless I'm married to them and I love them and they love me."

Though on-screen nudity of either gender is no longer as casual as it once was, it's refreshing that it's Radcliffe, rather than a female performer, who has raised this subject now. This year, after all, saw the release of Danny Boyle's Trance, which was deeply suspect on the matter of nudity: Rosario Dawson was required to be not only fully naked but divested of her pubic hair, while James McAvoy and Vincent Cassel played "nude" scenes that were in fact nothing of the sort. It's good, for once, to see a man wondering what else an actor might be relinquishing in the act of shedding clothes.