Daniel Radcliffe: Dirty Harry

Have you contacted your co-star in Harry Potter and the Order of the Phoenix—Robert Pattinson—to give him any advice about his own sudden fame because of the Twilight films? He was once quoted as saying that if given a choice between himself and you, that girls would choose you every time.

I don’t have his number, so haven’t spoken to him. But I can safely say that his insisting that girls would choose me over him that they would not. That they do not. He is the much prettier and can be much more charming. And he can do that thing of being sultry and sexy.

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You’re sexy, Daniel. Come on. Own it.

I can’t!

Yet in Equus you had a nude scene eight times a week. You’re flashing around your Elder Wand for all the world to see.

But I don’t know how to be sexy. Rob can just sort of stand there and look at something and start to smolder. And I just can’t do that. I’m a natural fidget.

What was it like working in the small bower world of the New York theatre? It’s a very different environment than film. Much more collegial and camp and...well, let’s face it...gay.

And for a lot of straight guys—and I know I’m guilty of it sometimes—when you know a gay guy has a crush on you it is the most flattering thing.

Forgive me, but to be politically incorrect here, I’ve seldom met a straight actor who is not a “fag hag.”Are you?

Oh, yeah. I know I definitely caught it. Absolutely. My mom was a casting director and my dad was a literary agent and I was surrounded by gay men from a very young age. And I was the only boy in my class at school who had that kind of relationship with gay men. Most of my friends had parents who had proper jobs in banks and law firms so none of them had been exposed to homosexuality in the way I had—as a normal course of things. So they had a rather different attitude toward it than I.

They’d just bugger each other.

Well, I didn’t go to a boarding school if that’s what you’re getting at. That’s one thing Harry Potter has done if nothing else. It has restored the reputation of the English boarding school.It has made it something other than a hotbed of homosexuality. Every time a new Harry Potter book or movie comes out, the numbers at English boarding schools go up.