Booze, nudity, excess: At 23 Harry Potter actor Daniel Radcliffe looks back on a (partly) misspent youth – and acting with Mad Men’s Jon Hamm

This article appears in 1 December print edition of The Independent’s Radar magazine

I’ve got to start,” says Daniel Radcliffe, “by saying my mum sent me a column you wrote.” For a moment, I’m thrown. I’ve got half an hour to interview one of the most famous young men in the world, which is less time than I’ve ever been given to interview anyone, and he’s talking about my work? The column, it turns out, was about Israel and Palestine, and mentioned a TV series called The Promise, which his mother cast. The column, from what he’s saying, was a masterpiece. And Daniel Radcliffe is clearly a very astute young man.

I’ve already been impressed by his manners. He’s polite to the photographer, polite to the PR, polite to the various people milling around the hotel suite who are all there, it’s clear, because of him. He’s polite as the photographer snaps, and asks him to look this way, and that way, and out of the window, and polite as the photographer leaves. And now that we’re on our own, on a sofa, in a Soho hotel room, he’s being very, very polite to me.

He’s being so nice that I want to be nice back. I want to tell him how much I love his work, but actually, it’s a bit tricky. I didn’t see him in Equus, which he starred in five years ago in London, and four years ago on Broadway, and which got him proper rave reviews. I didn’t see him in How to Succeed in Business Without Really Trying, the Broadway musical he did last year. I did see The Woman in Black, James Watkins’ film of Susan Hill’s novel, which came out in January, and was the highest-grossing British horror film for 20 years. But I can’t really say that I thought the novel was brilliant, but the film was a bit ridiculous, and that although he was very good at looking frightened, he did have to do it an awful lot.