What If role is the most human character Daniel Radcliffe has played

“I’m slow thinking and fast talking, it’s a lethal combination,” laughs Daniel Radcliffe.

The Harry Potter star has fast-talked himself into trouble more than once on the promotional tour of romantic comedy What If, the latest example coming on the very day we meet as he was forced to explain his criticism of modern action movies.

“People tell me that the romantic comedy genre has had a bad time recently, and I get that, but I don’t think it’s as bad as the action movie,” he told reporters in a press conference.

“There is never a character involved in any of those films, it’s just the same people in different cities with different cars.”

While his loose lips may get him into a hole where headline writers are concerned it also serves to make Daniel who he is, which is a very down-to-earth young man who gives honest answers to a straight questions and has never got caught up in his own fame.

You get the feeling there’s no difference meeting him in a suite in a London Hotel to promote his new movie to bumping into him in your local pub.

Indeed, Daniel is keener than most of his peers to meet people on an equal footing. At the annual Comic-Con event in San Diego last month he dressed up as Spider-Man so he could wander around the convention unhindered by requests for autographs or “selfies.”

“I’m very accepting of what my life is and one of the limitations of my life is that if I were to walk on the Comic-Con floor without a disguise there would be a reaction to it,” he tells me.

“That’s fine but it’s nice to be able to do something once in a while and have an interaction with people without your celebrity altering how people react to you.”

In What If he plays Wallace, a kind but overtly-cynical medical school drop-out whose heart has been numbed by his parents’ divorce and his girlfriend cheating on him.

He meets Chantry (Zoe Kazan), who is in a relationship of five years, at a party and with neither looking for love, the two enter the murky waters of agreeing to be “just friends”.

“It’s a very simple, sweet story, which I think is quite emotionally affecting as well,” says the 25-year-old.

“Films like this can be disposable but I hope that this is the kind of movie that will stick with people after they’ve seen it.

“I’ve heard people compare it to When Harry Met Sally but if there’s a point to be made, it’s more about how it’s silly to live in denial of your own feelings.”

Daniel recently went public with his relationship with Erin Darke, a 29-year-old American actress he met while filming the 2012 drama Kill Your Darlings.

The film about the college years of America’s “beat” generation of writers, in which Daniel played the closet homosexual poet Allen Ginsberg, did more than most to help him shed the cloak of Harry Potter.

He’s hoping that roles in the forthcoming fantasy horror Horns and as Igor in a new version of Frankenstein will put further distance between him and Hogwarts in the eyes of cinema audiences.

“My mum was a casting director and my dad was a literary agent whose job it was to find new writers, so I like to think I’ve inherited some of their tastes and instincts for scripts,” he says of choosing a role.

“I like good dialogue and fully realised characters, and if it has an original take on something that’s good too.

“Actors don’t think in terms of genre, you don’t say to your agent ‘Only show me romantic comedies from now on because I really want to do a romantic comedy’. You are just interested in good scripts and What If was one of those.”

He then smiled at the thought of movie genres and added: “I can’t picture myself in an action movie, though.”

Another film we won’t be seeing Daniel in is a remake of The Wizard of Oz, which has him chuckling just at the memory of it.

“It was the worst idea that I ever came across. It was way before Potter had finished and someone suggested casting Emma Watson as Dorothy, I was the Lion and Rupert Grint was going to be either Tin Man or the Scarecrow.

“I can’t remember which,” he tells me, getting up to leave, “but you can write whichever is funnier.”

And so ended another relaxed, pub-like conversation with the charming Daniel Radcliffe. Cheers, mate.

Our Verdict 3/5

When it comes to its central relationship, What If poses more questions than it answers and, unusually for a film of this ilk, your sympathies aren’t altogether with the romantic leads.

But what should have been a conversation starter on the protagonists’ moral ambiguity is let down by the male members of the supporting cast who are either trying too hard to be funny (Adam Driver) or not to come across as the clichd bad boy boyfriend (Rafe Spall).

The latter would normally be to the writer’s credit but here only serves to cloud the issue and has you asking “Why?” more than “What If..?”

What If is at cinemas from Wednesday.