One of the tricks today, he (Dan Radcliffe) tells me, is a conspiracy between himself and his two lead co-stars in the Potter franchise, Rupert Grint (who plays comic sidekick Ron Weasley) and Emma Watson (who plays the determined Hermione Granger) to give one unsuspecting Japanese journalist completely different answers to the same question. “There’s always this tendency to get the same questions over and over again,” smiles Radcliffe, “and so, you know, we thought we could have a little fun with that. The poor woman is going to go home with a real twister. It’ll be interesting to see how she makes sense of it all.”

How is the young Daniel Jacob Radcliffe coping with his teenage angst? “My middle name,” he smiles, “excellent. The good thing about being able to portray Harry whilst being a little older than him is that I will have already gone through whatever he’s feeling. So I can have a little bit of objectivity about it. I think everybody feels that kind of angst when they go through their teenage years, and Harry is no exception. And I was certainly no exception either.”

More importantly, is there a betting pool on set about the finale?

“Tell you what, we don’t have one,” he smiles, “but that’s not a bad idea. Before the end of the junket, we should have a sweepstake on who’s going to live or die. Which is a very macabre thing to say, obviously, but, you become desensitized at this. “Yeah, Alan is the only one who seems to know what’s going to happen, but then, over the last few days, David Yates also seems to know much more than the rest of us. I keep getting journalists coming in and saying, ‘Well, David Yates told us this, this and this’, and I’m replying, ‘Well, that’s pretty incredible, because I didn’t know. Wow!’. So, if you want to find out stuff, ask him!”

“I felt it was important for me to get some other roles under my belt before the end of Harry Potter,” explains Radcliffe. “I didn’t want to just do all the Harry Potter movies and then end up trying to reinvent myself. It seemed a better idea to start doing things in-between the Potters, so that I could ease people out of it gently. Although, Equus isn’t the most gentle of awakenings…”