Any movie, or movie franchise, that has a significant impact will cause people to want to know more about it. The story of the movie itself is important, but fans want to know all the stories from behind-the-scenes as well. As such, there are a lot of stories and rumors rolling around regarding the Harry Potter franchise, and Daniel Radcliffe would like to dispel one of them. He did not break 60 wands over the course of the franchise.
Promoting his new show Miracle Workers, Daniel Radcliffe appeared in a video for Variety where he answered a series of questions autogenerated by Google. One of them dealt with the number of wands that Radcliffe broke in the movies. The actor says he has seen claims that he broke as many as 100 wands, but he says that it wasn't nearly that many, it was more like a dozen. According to Radcliffe...
There is a thing that I sometimes see on Twitter - that's like, when I'm going on it to not have one but look at other people's - [an] amazing fact or weird trivia thing will pop up, and it'll be like, 'Daniel Radcliffe broke a hundred wands, or like sixty wands, on set.' It's not that many, guys. I used to like, use them and drum on my leg with it the whole time and eventually, you know, you sort of wear them down, and they will break. But yeah, it wasn't as many as that. I feel like everyone got through a few. And I was probably 12 maximum, absolute maximum of 20.
If Daniel Radcliffe broke somewhere between 12 and 20 wands then he broke something like one or two per movie, which probably isn't all that many. Radcliffe says that "everyone got through a few" so whether the quantity of wands that he broke over the course of the franchise is all that much more than his co-stars, we don't know.
The wand by its nature isn't exactly the most sturdy thing and they were certainly put through a lot over the course of the Harry Potter films. If we were told that the core cast all broke an average of one wand per movie it wouldn't be that shocking. One could easily accidentally hit something while waving it around.
Having said that, the reason that Daniel Radcliffe broke wands at all, is pretty unusual. It wasn't just from normal performance. He's spoken before about his habit of drumming with the wands, which was the general cause of their demise. Unless everybody was rocking out with their wands it would seem likely that even if other people broke wands, it wasn't with the same frequency.
Certainly the prop department made a bunch of extra wands in order to be sure that there would be enough in case some of them broke. At that point the money is already spent I guess, so it's maybe not that big a deal that the wands broke. There's no indication that extra wands needed to be made specifically because of Daniel Radcliffe's habit of breaking them.
