"I remember when we started off with Alfonso Cuarón, director of The Prisoner of Azkaban, he looked really cool and handsome. By the end he hadn't shaved in months, had massive hair - we destroyed him!" Radcliffe says this with some pride.

Gary [Oldman] tells me that he thinks "Dan" (as everyone calls him), on stage and on screen, is "fearless I don't know if I could have have done what he's done, and in particular what he's done in Equus. At 17! To - no pun intended - expose himself. Not physically get naked, but be vulnerable like that, to all the guns that could have just shot him down. I think that alone is a great achievement. And he's serious about it. He's a bright lad isn't he? I love Dan. Like one of my own."

"I was never at school long enough to build up good relationships with people. I had some good friends there, but I'd always go back and in the first two weeks I'd be, uh, I don't really know what's going on' So I've sort of taken on many of the characteristics of an old man!" he says with a laugh. "Normally on the sets everyone I'm around is much, much older than me, so when I went back it was very weird for me." Was it weird for his class mates too, having this superstar actor dropping in and out of lessons? "Possibly. I don't think so. Well, I dunno, it might be," he blusters, for a moment coming over like a normal, confused teenager. "They've got everyone else who they sort of know. It was just very odd going back. I'm quite glad that I won't be going through that coming and going thing again."

"But I've got quite big eyes, which freak a lot of people out. I started looking at other people's eyes and I thought, oh yeah, other people's eye's are slightly smaller than mine.'" Uh-oh, here comes Bug-Eyed Radcliffe. "Yeah exactly!" he laughs, happier to take the mickey out of himself than get bogged down in analysing his own acting merits. "In fact there was one boy at school who always used to think I'd taken opium or something - because my eyes were so massive and I looked wired all the time. But," this polite, grounded, clean young chap adds hastily, "I never had."