Daniel Radcliffe has closed the door on his time as teenage wizard Harry Potter, taking on the mature role of a father in the big screen adaptation of ghost story Woman in Black. Alongside this on-screen maturity, Radcliffe has revealed a more revelatory side than we are used to. In an interview with Heat magazine, he's opened up about stripping off for Equus, his love for his girlfriend Rosie, his problem with alcohol and how he deals with female attention. Read the best bits below...
On his Potter co-star Rupert Grint's hunky new body:
"I'm not going to try to compete with Rupert on the arms front. His dad is a big guy, so if anyone was going to get the proper muscleman build, it was Rupert. You'd have to search pretty hard to find a more handsome ginger. He's also a dude. I wish I could be that calm. I'm lucky to have found an industry where this level of hyperactivity is encouraged. Otherwise I'd just be a f**king nuisance!"
On stripping off for Equus and 'landscaping' his pubic hair for a new role:
"I'm comfortable with my body. It's funny, actually, I've just been having a discussion with the guy who's directing my new project. It might have a bit of nudity and he said, 'Just to let you know, if you're getting naked, no landscaping of any kind. This is the '40s and you're playing a Jew.' I was like, 'Pretty much there anyway, mate! Not a huge amount of maintenance going on.' I mean, there's a little bit, obviously, for courtesy. [Pauses.] This is way too much information, but I don't like girls with nothing down there either. It freaks me out. You have to have something, otherwise it's f**king creepy."
On girlfriend Rosie Cocker (his production-assistant girlfriend, who he met on the set of Harry Potter):
"She's lovely. She's a wonderful, wonderful girl, who's far too good for me. I find myself constantly going, 'Shit, you don't know what you're in for yet.'"
"She's going to kill me for telling you this, because she keeps saying, 'Dan, stop making me sound so f**king bossy.' The thing is, she's not. But we've just been away for a few days and I went straight home, while she had to go to her parents'. I got a call from her at lunchtime when she'd just arrived at our house and she goes, 'OK. Just going to start by saying you're a disgusting human being.' I was like, 'Why?', knowing full well what I'd done. The place had been spotless and I came home and exploded. Everything went everywhere. But it's not just the messy stuff; she's incredibly tolerant of me. I have a very busy personality.'
On his 'busy' personality:
"I never stop talking. I'm obsessive. I obsess over things she's not in the least bit interested in but she has to hear about, because I have no one else to talk to about them. Cricket, Fantasy Football, Fantasy NFL… I can also be quite insecure. A lot of actors have self-doubt. I live under that the whole time and it's how I function best. I think she puts up with a lot; she says she doesn't."
On drinking:
"I have a very addictive personality. It was a problem. People with problems like that are very adept at hiding it. It was bad. I don't want to go into details, but I drank a lot and it was daily – I mean nightly. I can honestly say I never drank at work on Harry Potter. I went into work still drunk, but I never drank at work. I can point to many scenes where I'm just gone. Dead behind the eyes."
"I think it's just in me. I loved the fact that suddenly I could talk to people and feel so entertaining and so interesting. But after a while, you're living under such a cloud of shame about what you've done and the dread of who you might see, what you might have said to them, what you might have done with them. You either have to change something or give in to that shame, and I wasn't prepared to do that at 21."
On dealing with female attention:
"I was always very nervous about the groupie thing. I like to like somebody before I sleep with them, I really do. You know you're going to have to talk to them afterwards, even if it is a one-night stand. I have… I mean, that has happened, but generally speaking I've known the person. Apart from a few times when I was drinking. Besides, I like having a girlfriend. Someone once said to me, 'You can go outside and pick from the girls at the stage door.' And I said, 'No, that's not me.' Because, to do that, you kind of have to be a dick."
The full interview appears in this week's heat magazine, on sale now (Tuesday).
