Daniel Radcliffe: I'm happy when people use my real name

The millionaire actor is easily pleased - just don't confuse him with his Harry Potter alter ego

Daniel Radcliffe: ‘I’m a geek, I’m obsessed with cricket. What a disappointment I must be to fans who meet me’ (Getty Images)

He might be the richest British star under 30 but Daniel Radcliffe is still chuffed to discover that people know his name.

At 23, the Harry Potter actor is still called Harry more often than Daniel. “I walked past two girls on a bench the other day, and I heard them both go ‘Oh my God, it’s Daniel Radcliffe’, and every time that happens I think: ‘Yesss!’ Not because they recognise me, because they use my name,” he said in an interview with The Telegraph.

Since the final instalment of JK Rowling’s wizard franchise came out last year, Radcliffe has been ploughing an interesting acting furrow trying to not to be typecast in further teen drama. Next year he plays the lead in a low-budget biopic about beat poet Allen Ginsberg, Kill Your Darlings.

He said playing a gay man “was slightly odd, but that film was shot so rapidly there was no time for prudishness or for worry”.

Revealing his worries about dating, Radcliffe said he preferred having girlfriends who work in the movie business because “they can be relaxed about all the time you have to be on location, and the love scenes you have to do. Where you’re kissing someone else, that takes a bit of getting used to, for everybody.”

He added: “Even when I went out with an actress who was having to do a love scene with somebody, I was like ‘Erm… I’m not sure I’m going to watch that’. It is always a weird thing, there’s no getting away from that.”

Read Christina Patterson's interview with Daniel Radcliffe in the Independent's Radar magazine this Saturday