Harry Potter - still working his magic

Daniel Radcliffe. Photo / Supplied by Roadshow

As Daniel Radcliffe enters a London hotel room he is talking on his mobile. When he puts it away he confides : "I'm such a terrible host. I invited a friend over for dinner tonight and because of all these interviews I've now told him to eat first!"

Radcliffe, who turns 20 in few weeks, is now definitely a young man. He may have performed those famous Equus nude scenes on stage partly to prove it, though he has long exhibited a certain maturity, the result of being on the set with some very interesting adults for most of his life. In interviews he never misses a beat, while on the set he is always generous and his co-workers have yet to dish on him.

Given the way many movie brats turn out - especially ones who are the undisputed stars of huge franchises (think Macaulay Culkin) - he has weathered childhood stardom remarkably well. What's more, he knows what he wants. When the final Harry Potter movies were about to be filmed he wanted them to be dark.

"My favourite stuff is always the dark stuff," he says. "When I read scripts for the first time that's what I always lean towards and it's what I want to see included - even more so in Harry Potter movies, because we need the films to appeal to adult audiences.

In fact one of the things I was disappointed about with the sixth Harry Potter movie was that there wasn't so much of that element."

The film's director, David Yates, who came on board with the previous film, Harry Potter and the Order of the Phoenix, and who will remain with the franchise until its conclusion, was however quick to point out that Radcliffe will get his fill of darkness in the final two films, both based on J.K. Rowling's final book, Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows.

"There's loads of darkness and not many laughs there, so David said it was best to give the audience as much comedy as we can while we can. There are huge opportunities for comedy in the sixth film and we use all of them, even though my natural inclination is not towards that. I love watching comedy but doing it is something else."

There are still three Harry Potter movies to come. Harry Potter and The Half-Blood Prince has long been completed - the release was delayed from November 08 to July 09. Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows: Part I comes out in November 2010 with Part II following in July 2011.

"I'm very happy that the seventh book is being made as two films," notes Radcliffe, "because I was worried they would have to cut important scenes. For example in the fourth film you could cut out the house elf sub-plot and it doesn't affect the main story in any way. In the second film they cut out the Nearly Headless Nick Death Day Party. In fact that whole character has fallen by the wayside. The problem with doing that with the final book is that there is nothing that doesn't relate to the main story or drive it forward. There's not much you could cut. So we've given ourselves the room and opportunity to do it justice."