Daniel Radcliffe turns down audience role at Harry Potter And The Cursed Child

Daniel Radcliffe has admitted he will not be seeing the new Harry Potter play because the audience would be too interested in his reaction.

Harry Potter And The Cursed Child is enjoying a sell-out run in London's West End and has won rave reviews, but Radcliffe will not be joining the crowds, including many of his co-stars, to see Jamie Parker play a grown-up wizard.

Radcliffe told the Press Association: "I probably won't see the play, it would be too crazy for me to sit in the audience of that.

"If everyone saw I was there and was watching my reaction to watching the play, I would feel a bit uncomfortable."

He also will not be making an offer on 12 Picket Post Close, the suburban house in Bracknell in Berkshire that served as 4 Privet Drive in the blockbuster films and which recently went on the market.

The house was home to Potter's dreadful aunt and uncle, the Dursleys, where the boy wizard was forced to sleep in a cupboard under the stairs.

Radcliffe said: "For me I think of Privet Drive as being the fake facade we had on the back lot of Potter so I can barely remember the place, but that was probably the very first day on filming ever.

"The official first day was September 29 2000, when we filmed at the train platform, but the unofficial first day was a few weeks before when we were filming at that location."

The actor, 27, has taken on a string of diverse roles since he left Hogwarts, including upcoming films Imperium and Swiss Army Man, in which he plays an FBI agent posing as a white supremacist and a farting corpse respectively.

Radcliffe said he does not deliberately seek out roles that will distance him from the one that made him famous, but he is interested in trying as many things as possible.

"I don't spend my time thinking 'Is this going to be the role that sets me apart?' because I don't want people to forget about Potter at all," he said.

"I love those films but it's nice that people are seeing me in different stuff."

He added: "I think I get slightly undue credit for picking diverse things because I think every actor wants to do that but because I played one character for so long it stands out more.

"I just want to keep working and doing cool stuff for as long as I can. There are things I want to direct and write hopefully in the future."

On his role in Swiss Army Man, which sparked walk-outs at its premiere at the Sundance film festival, he said: "The magical dead body that farts and has an erection that is also a compass is a weird thing on anyone's resume. There is not anyone who says 'I've done loads of them' but there are some people for whom seeing me in anything other than Harry Potter is a bit of a jarring experience."

The physical transformation he went through for Imperium, in which he shaved his head on screen, was a big help, he said.

"It's nice to look at yourself before you go on set and see a change, that gives you confidence to be the character more.

"I loved it, I really enjoyed the head shaving scene and having it shaved, it was so easy and low maintenance and you never have to think about 'How does my hair look?'"

Imperium is released in UK cinemas on September 23. Swiss Army Man is out on September 30.