Exclusive interview: Daniel Radcliffe

Daniel Radcliffe leaves Harry Potter behind with haunted house classic The Woman in Black. Nev Pierce meets him on the set of the new British horror

Daniel Radcliffe doesn’t really like scary movies. This is ironic, given how many of them he’s been in. True, the Harry Potter franchise is not exactly a gore-drenched dismemberment marathon, but since the age of 11, Radcliffe has been required to look wide-eyed at a vast range of beastly and ghoulish creations, as JK Rowling’s boy wizard.

So, while his new film The Woman in Black is a departure, it is not a drastic one. Instead, it’s a smart career step – evolution, not revolution – for a man who hopes to leave behind the boy and become an actor rather than an icon.

Radcliffe is 22 now, still bright-eyed, no trace of cynicism, and enjoying the process of being petrified on screen.

“Someone said to me the other day, ‘Is it weird reacting to stuff that’s not necessarily there?’ I said, ‘Have you no knowledge of my previous work?’” He laughs. On set he looks every inch the Victorian gentleman: the inches mostly being sideburns – Potter never had those. “The visual effects stuff I’ve been doing has stood me in very good stead for the rest of my career. What’s interesting here is that it’s not like on Harry Potter, where we’d react to something that wasn’t there but will be. Here, it’s normally something that isn’t there and won’t be – it might be behind the door or a noise coming from upstairs...”

Creaks, groans and whispers on the wind evoke a chilly atmosphere in The Woman in Black, an adaptation of Susan Hill’s novel, already made into a famously terrifying stage play (still running in London’s West End). The story revolves around young lawyer Arthur Kipps, who is grieving over the death of his wife and trying to raise his son.

With his job in jeopardy, he accepts the seemingly simple task of settling a woman’s will in the coastal village of Crythin Gifford, only to discover that there is a dark past to the place – particularly the eerie Eel Marsh House.

For the film shoot, that building has been built in bits, in various locations. Today, we’re in its gloomy heart, where the creepy, lived-in (and died-in) feel belies the fact this is a set created on a studio stage in south London.

The morning’s shooting requires Radcliffe to be spooked by a child who runs in and out of the shadows. The actor is right that the material relies on what is suggested as much as what is seen, with an expert screenplay from X-Men: First Class writer Jane Goldman.

“It’s probably the best script I’ve read,” says Radcliffe. “It was brilliant and unsettling and weird.” The timing also worked out well, as it allowed him to work straightaway following the final Potter outing, “I wanted to do something immediately and get on to something else.”

It confirmed the commitment to acting he had already shown on stage in the Peter Shaffer play Equus in 2007. Following The Woman in Black, he was back on Broadway in New York in the musical How to Succeed in Business Without Really Trying – a performance described by Entertainment Weekly as “triumphant”.

Radcliffe has described his commitment as a “personal crusade” to show that child stars don’t have to go off the rails. And while headlines were made when he revealed in an interview that he no longer drinks alcohol, it’s not as if he’s ever managed Drew Barrymore-style child-star excess.

He is dating film production assistant Roseanne Coker and is focusing on his work. While the Potter films have made him rich (he has a reported £48 million fortune) and he owns homes in both London and Manhattan, his most regular purchase is, he says, “books”. He’ll never have to work to live, though he may find he enjoys living to work – clearly growing up on screen has not put him off it. He hopes to have a varied, lengthy career.

Until now, we’ve only seen him without a wand in the films My Boy Jack and December Boys, so it could be a leap to accept him as a parent in his latest work, but viewers may be surprised at just how much emotion and strength he brings to this role.

When his name came up in casting, Jane Goldman and director James Watkins didn’t take long to agree.

“I thought he was perfect,” says Goldman. “Susan Hill had written Kipps as being young. I think we forget that’s how old you were when you had children and family and a career back then. So it didn’t seem like a leap at all. James and I were tremendously excited that he was keen to do it. As soon as his name came up we thought, ‘That’s a brilliant idea! I hope he wants to do it.’”

Watkins feels Radcliffe has delivered, too: “I think people are going to see a new side of Dan – a different, more grown-up, mature performance. There are layers to it. You can see the thought in his eyes and you can feel his loss and his longing. I’m really proud of a lot of the stuff he’s done.”

Radcliffe was equally excited by the prospect of working with Watkins. “James and I were just totally on the same page,” he says, reflecting on when he first met the Eden Lake director. “I thought that film was like The Wicker Man as directed by Ken Loach. It’s horror but with a great element of social realism in it. James doesn’t see a horror film as a series of scares. He realises we will only be scared if we care about the characters. We agreed The Woman in Black wasn’t just a horror film: it’s about family and loss. It’s a character-driven movie.”

Radcliffe is leaving one character behind, inhabiting new ones and finding his own. The boy wizard has grown up. The tag line for Harry Potter And The Deathly Hallows is “It all ends.” For Radcliffe, it’s just beginning.

The Woman in Black is out on 10 February

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