He just turned 25. So there’s no calling Daniel Radcliffe “kid” any more.

But there is something of the “kid in a candy store” to his wide-ranging
choice of roles in the short time since he hung up Harry Potter’s invisibility
cloak.

He played a lawyer contending with a vengeful ghost in “The Woman in Black,”
gay poet Allen Ginsburg during his formative college years in “”Kill Your
Darlings,” and paired up with Jon Hamm for the short TV series about physicians
in Revolutionary Russia in “A Young Doctor’s Notebook.”

Every so often, he devotes a few months to the theater, most recently
starring as “The Cripple of Inishmaan.”

“Kid in a candy store — that’s pretty much how I’m looking at it,” he admits
with a chuckle. “I’m …kind of trying a little bit of everything. Playing one
part for a long time builds up in you a desire to play lots of different roles,
see what you’re like, what you might be good at.”

So he donned “Horns” to play a young man who grows horns after his
girlfriend’s mysterious death, a film due out this fall. And he took on his
first-ever romantic comedy leading man role, in “What If,” starring opposite Zoe
Kazan, now in theaters.

“I’m still finding out who I am as an actor, what I like doing and what I’m
best at,” Radcliffe says. “That’s how I have the most fun, facing the unexpected
every time out. If I have the chance, at this stage in my career, I’m going to
do the widest variety of roles.”

He has that “chance,” that freedom of choice, because he was in “the most
commercially successful film franchise of all time.” There’s no pressure to find
another film franchise, or even to star in another blockbuster.

“I’m never going to get that level again, for starters,” Radcliffe says. “But
financially, I only have to do things that I’m passionate about. I don’t have to
do stuff I’m not interested in just to make a living. For as long as I’m in this
position, that’s what I intend to do.”

Estimates of his vast Harry Potter earnings vary widely, but suffice it to
say he doesn’t sweat the Monday morning box office figures. If a “Woman in
Black” hits and a “Kill Your Darlings” doesn’t, it was the interesting work that
mattered to Radcliffe.

“What If” began life as a script titled “The F-Word,” as in “friend,” as in a
young man who meets young woman he clicks with (Kazan) only to discover she’s in
a long-term, committed relationship. She values his company, but he’s smitten
and condemned to “the friend zone.”

“It’s an odd term, a very modern term — ‘the Friend Zone,’ he says. “In a
way, being in a relationship with somebody who is your best friend is kind of
the ideal. You want that person you fall in love with and marry to be your best
friend.

“But if somebody says, ‘That girl put me in ‘The Friend Zone,’ it implies
that the only attraction you have for that person is sexual. I don’t think all
men are like that. To be honest, we’re not all that shallow.”

So, decades of living with that “When Harry Met Sally” rule, “Men and women
can’t be friends,” was a mistake?

“I just don’t believe that’s the case any more. But the movie’s more about
‘Is it ever right to maintain a relationship that’s a denial of your own
feelings?’ My character meets this girl, finds out she has a boyfriend and
instead of going, ‘I’ll just move on with my life,’ he chooses to torture
himself by being around her because she makes him so happy he can’t NOT spend
time with her.”

Critics have been enthusiastic about Radcliffe and Kazan’s obvious chemistry,
their way with witty/flirtatious banter. Peter Rainer of The Christian Science
Monitor praised their “nerds-in-clover rapport,” and even though she found “What
If” “too cute for its own good,” The Village Voice’s Stephanie Zacharek said
“it’s so enjoyable from moment to moment that it’s easy to forgive.”

One thing the Michael Dowse film uses, to great effect, is a sight gag. The
5’5″ Radcliffe and 5’4″ Kazan are forever being paired up with Adam Driver
(6’3″), as Radcliffe’s character’s best friend, and Rafe Spall (6’1″) as Kazan’s
character’s live-in beau.

“I didn’t care,” Radcliffe says, declaring he’s not touchy about playing a
sight-gag. “I have met tall people before. The shot of me and Adam walking down
the street, it takes a special lens to keep us both in the frame!”

But ask him who he looks to as a career role model and there’s no hesitation.
It’s one of his “Horns” co-stars, a man of similar stature.

“As I neared the end of Potter, I started paying a lot of attention to what
James McAvoy was doing. He’s having an extraordinary career and it’s still only
just getting started. He’s done it his own way.”

Radcliffe has a turn as “Igor” in a new film about Frankenstein, and has
another movie project or two in the planning stages. He longs for that next
chance tread the boards in London’s West End or on Broadway.

“I love the theater, because it forces you to be accountable. You have to be
on, every second you’re on the stage. Because the audience can tell if you’re
not.”

But those lingering rumors of J.K. Rowling having more to say with Harry
Potter, the young wizard now grown to adulthood, and possible films that might
come from that do not interest Radcliffe. The role that made him rich and famous
is over, as far as he is concerned.

“I cannot envisage a scenario where I would be going back into that world,”
he says. “Maybe you’ll be confronting me with that answer in a few year’s time,
if I say ‘Yes.’ But at the moment, I am having too fun to see what would be gained by me going to Harry.”