Daniel Radcliffe is back post-Potter

Daniel Radcliffe is finally shaking free of Harry Potter. Source: The Daily Telegraph

HE'S among the world's most recognisable actors, though if you put his photo under the noses of the world's kids most would probably name him as Harry Potter rather than Daniel Radcliffe.

But with the Potter franchise now - allegedly - over, Daniel Radcliffe, at the age of 22, is reclaiming his own identity.

The opening scene in his first post-Potter film, The Woman In Black, shows Radcliffe placing a cutthroat razor to his own neck.

Radcliffe says it wasn't director James Watkins' intention to imply that the Potter boy was gone and that they were now looking at a grown man using a razor.

"No, that was in the script before I was ever in the part," says Radcliffe, who in an interview in a penthouse suite at New York's Waldorf-Astoria Hotel, comes across as unspoiled by his fame.

He seems sincere, is alarmingly wise for his age and does his best to give thoughtful answers to questions.

The film - which has become the the highest-grossing British horror film in 20 years - is based on the 1982 book of the same name by Susan Hill.

Set in horse and carriage and big-sideburn times, Arthur Kipps, the young London lawyer played by Radcliffe, is sent to settle the affairs of a recently deceased elderly woman who was client of his law firm.

Arriving at a remote windswept town on the marshes, he visits the lonely ramshackle mansion where the woman lived - but not before seeing a frightening apparition of a thin, parchment-faced woman in the nearby town's graveyard.

! "He's a young man who's become completely disconnected from the world," says Radcliffe of his character.

"So he lives with a sense of injustice and I think in the intervening five years between his wife dying and finding him where he is in the film there's been just self-pity and depression and exhaustion and anger and anxiety."

It is perhaps a reflection of Radcliffe's personality that he did not choose, for his first post-Potter coming out, to play a classic hero who nails both the babes and the bad guys. It suggests that Radcliffe feels comfortable with his British cultural heritage.

But he says: "I'm looking forward to doing something slightly more contemporary. Starched collars have been a feature of my career so far and I'm kind of looking forward not to having them."

Since the age of 11, Radcliffe has been Potter. This has required him to put all his trust - and virtually his life - in the hands of others.

Asked how it now felt to back his own judgment and choose his own projects, he says: "Great. I trust my own instincts and judgments in terms of what is good in terms of scripts, I think I've got pretty good taste, so I'm excited by that prospect rather than daunted.

"That feels nice. To be able to say yes to a film, rather than saying, 'No, I'll be doing Potter for the next two years I'm not available,' to be available to choose films and be able to do two or three a year will be very exciting if that happens."

Off-set, Radcliffe is a young man with enormous personal wealth. He is no doubt an attractive target to people who would seek to exploit him but he says it hasn't made him suspicious of people.

"You have to be open to experiences," he says. "There's two ways of living. You can either close yourself off completely, isolate yourself and be completely safe, or you can just trust your instincts and judgments about people."

Radcliffe is underwhelmed by people his own age and younger, who he says have been zoned out by technology.

The ! Woman In Black out May 17