Daniel Radcliffe: Don't Say I Didn't Warn You!

"There is no truth to it at all. It's one of those very, very funny things: it came out of a story in the Daily Star and then you see newspapers like The Guardian using The Star as their source, and it grows and grows [until] it's 'Dan Radcliffe is playing Freddie Mercury!', which I was never going to do."

"Everyone on the internet who I presume is saying I'm totally wrong for that part is correct," he laughed. "I AM completely wrong for that part!"
 
"If I'd seen a rumour about me playing Iggy Pop, I'd think, 'Hey, I'd have a go at that - that'd be fun!', but Freddie Mercury? No. I don't even know who the director is. They seem to be saying it's Stephen Frears and Tom Hooper on the internet."

"This is the kind of thing that happens to me and it happens to Emma (Watson) with multiple 50 Shades Of Grey things. When somebody has column inches to fill, they just sub in one of our names." 

Daniel Radcliffe talking to Empire in a podcast - about the story that he was going to play Freddie Mercury in the new biopic.
A fiction ran as fact in media around the world.
Except for one lone voice crying "This sounds like bollocks!" in the wilderness - the mighty Fagburn!
Journalists would make their lives so much easier - and far less embarrassing - if they just listened to me in the first place.
Hey-ho...

The Guardian online - though there's an embedded link they don't make it explicit how they published this crapola without bothering to check it.
Journalism fuck yeah!

Another way stories appear in the Daily Star (and they are not alone) are when they are simply made up, or based on such scant, dubious evidence as to essentially be untrue. I list in my resignation letter (attached) a number of stories that I wrote via this method, in the full knowledge, and on occasion request, of superiors. Most, but not all, of the fabricated stories featured the Daily Star’s most referenced celebrities – Katie Price, Peter Andre, Kerry Katona etc. These people’s careers are symbiotically linked to tabloid column inches, and therefore they were very unlikely to sue over false stories...

Former Daily Star journalist, Richard Peppiatt, statement to the Leveson Inquiry [Thanks to fillo].

PS UND! here's a video of Ed Miliband auditioning for the part of Queen Freddie at Labour party conference yesterday. ONE VISION!

Update: I'm far too nice to gloat - and moreover there are far too many to list - but there are some hilarious reverse ferrets on this today, in both the gay and straight media, often forgetting to mention how they'd run the Star story as if it was deffo deffo true. Hahaha!