Sitting in a Los Angles hotel room, chatting away about his latest film, you’d assume that all was well in Daniel Radcliffe’s world. But deep down the Harry Potter star is missing the woman who has stolen his heart – Rosie Coker.
Daniel, 22, has been in America for weeks promoting the spine-chilling horror movie, The Woman in Black. And, looking wistful, he admits he’s desperate to get back to England and to his girlfriend of more than a year.
“I haven’t seen her for weeks and I won’t even be back for Valentine’s Day,” he says with a sigh. “I’ll be home a few days later, though, so I’ll have to make up for lost time. I can’t wait to see Rosie. I’ve got three weeks off so we can be together – although I do plan to watch quite a bit of sport on TV.”
He smiles to show he’s only joking then adds: “When I’m with Rosie every day seems to get better and better and I’ve got someone in my life who makes me happier than I ever thought I could be. “Rosie’s lovely. She’s a wonderful, wonderful girl – but far too good for me! I find myself constantly going, ‘S***, you don’t know what you’re in for yet!’”
Daniel met Rosie, 22, on the set of the last Harry Potter film where she was a production assistant. Surprisingly, this heartthrob with millions of female fans around the world admits it took him a while to woo Rosie because “I’m c*** at the whole dating thing”. Daniel adds: “I’m not an easy person to love. There are lots of times when I’m a very good boyfriend but there are times when I’m useless. I’m a mess around the house, I talk non-stop, I get obsessed with things. “But she listens to it all, and she loves my oddness and awkwardness. She finds it cute. I guess that’s love.”Watching Daniel’s face light up when he talks about Rosie, you can tell how hard he finds it to be parted from her.
He says: “It’s a case of us making time for each other whenever we can. She did a huge amount of travelling last year to visit me as often as she could while I was on stage in New York.”Still, it can’t be easy for her dealing with all the devoted Harry Potter fans who mob Daniel wherever he goes.
“It’s mad and I have to keep myself grounded,” he says. “But Rosie’s getting used to it, she’s very understanding and incredibly adaptable. She knows how wild it is and how much it all has to be laughed at and not taken seriously.”
But Daniel admitted recently: “I was always very nervous about the groupie thing. I like to like somebody before I sleep with them. 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. I have a crazy life... somebody will tell me we’re going to an airport and I know vaguely what we’re doing but I have no idea when so I take it a day at a time.”
Daniel also took it a day at a time when he quit drinking 18 months ago after he had booze blackouts. He reveals: “Harry Potter put me around people like the actor Richard Harris and I heard all their amazing stories about their drunken nights. That was what I was desperately trying to pursue.
“But I was a really annoying, loud, inappropriate, messy drunk. I’m good fun for the first four drinks and after that it’s a rapid, rapid decline into where I have to be helped home. Blackout was kind of my thing.”
He has also moved on from Harry Potter into serious adult movies. His latest The Woman In Black was the biggest-grossing movie in America on its opening weekend. In it Daniel plays Arthur Kipps, a young widower and lawyer in 19th century London who is sent to a remote Yorkshire village to sort through a dead woman’s papers in her creepy mansion. There he is haunted by the Woman in Black who is seeking murderous revenge for the loss of her child.
Daniel explains: “I read the script a few hours after I’d done my last shot on Harry Potter. The fact that it was a horror film was unexpected and out of the blue. I’d never pictured myself doing one, so it made it all the more enticing. It’s about loss and what happens to us if we don’t move on from loss and I absolutely knew it was what I wanted to do next.
“I’m very, very proud of Potter but I have to now prove to people that I’m serious about acting and the way to do that is select interesting material. This was a great script and a great story because it’s so unsettling and frightening.
“There’s a certain kind of sadistic joy to be had in knowing you’re in a horror movie that’s really going to freak people out. Here’s this guy who’s lost his wife, goes to this house and starts seeing the ghost of a dead woman. I think he stays out of a hidden desire to get some sort of assurance that his wife is in a better place.”
Daniel has already proved himself to be a versatile actor both on screen and on stage. While still filming Harry Potter he appeared in the West End and on Broadway in Equus. And his recent Broadway run in How To Succeed in Business Without Really Trying earned him critical acclaim, a Grammy nomination and an Audience Choice Award for Favourite Actor in a Musical.
Entertainment Weekly voted him Entertainer of the Year in 2011. And in his next film, Kill Your Darlings, he will play the gay beat poet Allen Ginsberg.
“If I can, I want to mix stage and film for the rest of my career,” he says. “Being on stage was a fantastic experience and doing a comedy and having to be confident in front of an audience was something I’d never had to do before, it was amazing.”
He has, of course, already earned a fortune but Daniel does not flaunt his wealth. His biggest extravagance is art – pieces by Damien Hirst and Craigie Aitchison hang in his London flat. He doesn’t own a car and rarely goes on holidays, but he has several properties which he says are investments and handled by his mother.
He devotes time and money to Demelza House, a hospice for terminally ill children, and to the Trevor Project, a non-profit organisation for suicide prevention.
Daniel says: “You have to keep a sense of reality about what’s important and never let fame be part of your identity. Fame won’t be around at this level for ever, so the moment it goes you’ll suddenly realise that you don’t know who you are.
“I’m proud that I think I know who I am and what I come down to as a human being because I don’t see myself as a famous person.”