“The Harry Potter films finishing comes with the same inevitability as aging. While there’s sadness for things that won’t be the same again, experiences I’ve had now that I won’t have again, it was always going to have to end. So I’ve been prepared for it for quite a while.”

He considers it for a moment. “I’m not crying myself to sleep at night, luckily.”

“To have been in the middle of a worldwide phenomenon for 10 years is just bizarre, to be honest,” he says. “It affords you no end of very surreal moments in life.”

“I could go and fool around on the set for three hours every day,” Radcliffe recalls. “I do maintain there is no place more fun on Earth as an 11-year-old boy than a film set, because you just have limitless toys at your disposal.”

“Through the process of making the films, I’ve learned everything I know about how to live,” he says, sounding older than his years, “about my own morality and my principles and what I think is important.”

Harry Potter and the Sorcerer’s Stone: The scene on the Hogwarts Express where Harry Potter and Ron Weasley get to know one another also offered 11-year-old actors Radcliffe and Rupert Grint the same luxury. “That scene was our standby weather-cover scene for a good part of the film, so anytime it would rain and we’d be on location, we’d end up going indoors and keep coming back to it.”

Harry Potter and the Chamber of Secrets: Harry’s rivalry with Draco Malfoy (Tom Felton, r, pictured here with Jason Isaacs who plays Lucius Malfoy) featured many great sequences, including one where the two Hogwarts students dueled with wands on a big catwalk. “It was a lot of stunts and wirework, so that was very good fun.”

Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows — Part 2: Fittingly, Radcliffe’s favorite memory of all is the one fans have been waiting to see for eight films: Harry’s final battle with Ralph Fiennes’ evil Lord Voldemort, where the two actors battled on green screen and wires together.

“There’s a point during the film where it stops being about magic and he becomes so frustrated that he just starts to beat me up, basically,” Radcliffe says. “Hopefully, it’ll soup up the intensity toward the end. I’m looking forward to seeing what people make of it.”