Daniel Radcliffe

Interview By: Michael Dance
MichaelDance@TheCinemaSource.com

It's an exciting time to be a Harry Potter fan. The night before July 21st, you'll start seeing lines down the street of people waiting outside bookstores in breathless anticipation of the final book, Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows. To tide us over, we've got no less of an event with the opening of the fifth film: Harry Potter and the Order of the Phoenix.

At the center of all the craziness, there's The Boy Who Lived himself - or at least his real-life counterpart. Daniel Radcliffe has been playing the part of Harry Potter for eight years now, and he's got two more films to go. As far as the books go, though, he's just another excited fan. "None of us get a preview," he says of himself and his castmates Rupert Grint and Emma Watson, who play his best friends Ron and Hermione. "I think J.K. Rowling's husband has only recently found out what happens. I don't think anybody else knows."

He's hesitant to theorize, though. "Couple of years ago I said that I would like Harry to die, because...that's a conclusive ending. And I'm sort of going to steer away from that now, because the next day's headlines were "'Radcliffe Wants Harry Dead.'" He laughs. "I think he might [die], but that's based on absolutely nothing. You know'"

On Order of the Phoenix, the cast was treated to their fourth director, this time a veteran of TV, David Yates. He quickly won everyone over. "I'm thinking of getting David Yates into his director's chair and breaking his legs so he can never leave," he says, and then starts laughing again. "That's a rather grotesque way of saying it, I'm terribly sorry." In reality, Radcliffe credits his improved acting skills in this film directly to Yates. "David would come up to me after a take, and he'd just say, 'that one was good, but it wasn't real, and you can get it better than that.' And there were times that I was thinking,'I can't! I don't know how!' And actually, in the end, I could." Radcliffe still sounds surprised about this. "I do like to be challenged, and pushed, and that's why David came at the perfect time for me, because he is totally willing to do that. It was great."

In fact, Yates's encouragement even got Radcliffe to overdo it a bit in scenes in which he's presiding over Dumbledore's Army, a secret group of students learning how to battle the Dark Arts. "Those scenes were great for me. [Harry] starts off as a sort of very reluctant leader, and by the end he's Henry V. To the point where David gave me a note where he said, 'Dan, reign it in a bit with Henry V. We don't want it to go quite that far yet.'"

Other than wanting his character to die and wanting to physically harm his director, Radcliffe doesn't come across at all to be a morbid or violent teenager. No, the real surprise to novices of Phoenix is that that description might more adequately suit Harry. "I think Harry has bad aspects that I think everybody has, in a way. When he lashes out in this film, he lashed out at his two best friends," he says. "I think he can be selfish, because he feels he has to live up to this image that all these people have of him, you know, of this sort of Great Defender of Right and Magical Things, which is, yeah, a very inarticulate way of saying it. I think he does feel he has to be the hero, and he has to go it alone, so he does try and cut himself off from people. And also, possibly, in the third film, when Snape infers that he's like his father in that he's arrogant, I think there's possibly some truth in that."

Of course, Harry has plenty of reasons to be moody. He's a fifteen-year-old boy, which is never a shining time for anyone. Not least someone with no parents who's been in seclusion all summer after seeing one of his friends get murdered by his archnemesis Voldemort. "I remember a lot of people had a problem with the fifth book, because they said they didn't like Harry's anger in it, they felt like he was too angry. And J.K. Rowling did just say, 'if you haven't understood Harry's anger in the fifth book, then you haven't understood the four books previous to it. Because if you did, then you would understand that he has a right to be this angry.'"

And yet even despite all that, Harry matures throughout the story and continues to always want to do the right thing. "It's about sticking to your guns. If you know something is the truth, and you know that it's right, then you can't let yourself be compromised by other people and outside forces, and I think that's what Harry and Dumbledore both do in this film...It's a central message to the film, certainly."

While the film has plenty of dark subject matter, Radcliffe's favorite scene was one of the lightest, a human moment between him, Emma, and Rupert. "I like the scene after the kiss with Cho Chang" -- yeah, Harry gets some action in this flick -- "because we're all just in hysterics, and I think a lot of that was genuine. I think that day we were just in a giggly mood. And if you watch it, you can watch me, and well all of us actually, trying to keep it together."

Yes, the castmates all get along magically (pun very much intended), despite a couple of London tabloid reports a few months ago that said Watson didn't want to renew her contract for the final two films. Watson did hesitate signing the contract, but explains it was just because she needed to figure out how to keep up with her schooling and the filming at the same time. Radcliffe is quick to defend her, and quite diplomatically at that. "It's important to realize that when you commit to a Potter film it is, you know, on the whole, about a ten month commitment, and especially if we were thinking about the sixth or seventh, that's two years, and so it's never something that should be rushed into lightly. And a lot was made of it that was obviously generated by the media, I suppose."

As for his own life, Radcliffe seems excited about acting, and is taking remarkably sure-footed steps to make sure he'll have a career after Harry Potter is all over. After filming was finished on Order of the Phoenix, he took a role on the London stage in the play Equus. In it, his character appears completely nude, and taking the part was a huge gamble -- one that paid off swimmingly, thanks to great reviews and a sold-out run. "The stage experience was phenomenal, I think it came at just exactly the right time for me," Radcliffe says. "I think at that stage it was exactly what I needed to do. And it was great fun. It was fantastic, and I met some brilliant people, and I got to work with Richard Griffiths in a totally different capacity." Griffiths, an accomplished stage actor, also plays Harry's Uncle Vernon in the Potter films. "As Uncle Vernon, it's great, and we always have a laugh, but he's only there for a week, week and a half. And so to spend sixteen weeks, more, as this kind of character, with him, was fantastic."

Radcliffe also has two upcoming films that have nothing to do with his boy wizard. "December Boys is something I did in Australia in 2005, it's about four boys who grow up in a Catholic orphanage in the outback of Australia. And due to a generous donation to the orphanage, they're all sent on holiday for their birthday month, which is December, hence, why they are The December Boys. And they all have various rites of passage while they are away." Yep, he plays another orphan. "The tally is now up to three orphans," he jokes. (He also starred in a TV version of Charles Dickens's David Copperfield when he was younger.)

Luckily, he's also got a non-orphan project. "Late in the year I'm doing My Boy Jack, which is about Rudyard Kipling and his son, who was sent off, who wanted to go, to war, despite having failed numerous army medical tests because his eyesight was so bad. And it's a very very sad story, yes, you could sort of guess that that one doesn't end happily. But it's a beautiful, beautiful script, written by David Haig, who's also playing Rudyard Kipling, so, it's very exciting."

With likability and talent working for him, it looks like Radcliffe has an exciting future ahead of him (he also notes that he'd like to try writing someday). Of course, he acknowledges that sometimes it's hard to put the past behind you, as well. "At one point I was in a screening of Harry Potter 5... and there was a clip from me in the first film, used in the fifth," he says. "And I just heard loads of girls go 'awwwwww.' And that was just soul-destroying."