Rob Ashford: This is the 50th anniversary of How to Succeed. What do you think is relevant about the show today?
Dan Radcliffe: First of all, we live in times where big business is under a huge amount of scrutiny. It will be fun for people to see big business to have the **** taken out of it. That’s going to be funny. And, also, you’ve got with the advent of Facebook and actually last year the film The Social Network, Finch is kind of a period Mark Zuckerberg who is a kid who comes to a realization that he’s smarter than everybody else out there, and he wont let being a kid in any way inhibit him from obtaining what he wants. As a comment on the sexism in the ‘50s, it’s very, very clever and it’s very funny. I don’t think that ever becomes irrelevant or dated.

Rob: Climbing the ladder – the success part – rules the sex part. There’s a number “A Secretary is Not a Toy” and it’s their mantra. “Don’t fool around. You’re going to get fired if you fool around.” Even though they want to fool around.
Dan: Yes. I went and saw Promises at the same time I was thinking a lot about How to Succeed and the key difference to me in terms of the two lead characters is that Promises is about a guy who would never let his ambition get in the way of his morality, and Finch is someone who will never let his morality get in the way of his ambition. So it’s a fundamental opposite.

Rob: What do you listen to? What’s on your iPod?
Dan: A guy called Edgar ‘Jones’ Jones. He’s this Liverpudlian guy. The album’s a few years old, isn’t it? I think it’s like 2005 it came out – and it’s not like any other album that I’ve heard. It sounds like it could’ve been made anywhere between 1920 and 1950. And I found this band called Cars Can Be Blue. It’s proper punk music. Not pop-punk, not anything else. It’s really good and it’s funny lyrically, really clever and just proper punk music. I think they’ve got two albums out.

Rob: Do you find it a different experience performing in London, performing in New York?
Dan: I think it’s a different dynamic then it is in London. I love working in London. It’s my home. I love being there and I love London audiences.

Rob: Is there a difference between going to the theatre and seeing a show?
Dan: Yeah, that’s the thing. There’s something about the idea of that – of going out to see a Broadway show. Also, some people here can see 30 to 40 shows a year. That might be my lifetime total of shows, between 40 and 50 shows, maybe. In London, people who go to the theatre are very aware always of what’s going on in the theatre, but I don’t know that the whole city is aware.

Rob: What was your first theatre viewing experience?
Dan: Aladdin in panto at the Salisbury Theatre. I turned around to my mum and said, “I want to be an actor” and she said, “No, you don’t” and then the conversation ended there for five years. One of my earliest, really delighted memories in the theatre was seeing Midsummer Night’s Dream at the Comedy Theatre directed by Ed Hall.

Rob: What was your first theatrical performance?
Dan: I never really did any school plays. The only school play I did was a production of Nellie the Elephant. I was about 6, maybe younger actually, and I was one of the monkeys in the background.

Rob: I have the videotape right here.
Dan: Oh good. Fantastic. (laughs) And before I did Equus, Ken Branagh, who was in the second Potter film, he got me in to do The Play What I Wrote with Sean Foley and Hamish McColl. I think I did that three times and came away going, “That is amazing. I definitely have to do that again.”