Harry Potter and the Half-Blood Prince is edging ever-closer to release, but we're already thinking ahead to Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows, and so when we sat down recently to talk to Daniel Radcliffe and franchise producer David Heyman, we asked them about the split between the planned two parts of Deathly Hallows.
"We've played around with a couple of places," said Heyman, "and ultimately settled on a place that we think is very exciting, and I think quite bold, in that it's not necessarily where one might expect. You want to give a sense of completion, on one hand, but a sense that there's another piece, more to come. We tried one and then Steve (Kloves, screenwriter) came up with the idea to try it another way and when we tried that, it felt just right."
Daniel Radcliffe added that the split is "at a very tense cliffhanger", which may be a bigger clue for fans.
The pair also discussed the coda to the end of the seventh book (Mild spoilers follow), which takes place 19 years after the main story. While Heyman is keen to use Benjamin Button-like technology to age the three main actors to play their older selves, Radcliffe is equally keen to get it right.
"I am nervous about that," he told us, "because if it's good I'll be really, really pleased; if it's not good and that's what people are left with, that would be awful. If it's a choice between having me, Rupert and Emma looking a bit stupid and it being slightly comical or having other actors play us, I would go for other actors every time. So, we'll see."
There's much more from Heyman and Radcliffe in this month's Empire, out on April 23. Did we mention it's our birthday and we've got lots of good stuff in there? We did, once or twice? Oh good.