Daniel Radcliffe grows up with Harry Potter

updated 1:15 p.m. ET July 11, 2007

NEW YORK - Don’t get your hopes up, gossip hounds. Daniel Radcliffe, who turns 18 later this month, isn’t planning any trips to rehab or jail.

“What everybody would love to see is me having ditched school and then just going wild,” says Radcliffe, star of the “Harry Potter” movies, in the latest issue of Entertainment Weekly magazine, on newsstands Friday. “That’s what I’m determined not to give them.”

Radcliffe was 11 when he was first cast as the bespectacled schoolboy wizard.

Warner Bros.’ “Harry Potter and the Order of the Phoenix,” the fifth movie in the series based on J.K. Rowling’s novels, opened Wednesday.

“I actually don’t mind watching myself, for sort of the first time in five films,” Radcliffe says. “I have got better. Thank God! I still see a lot of room for improvement, obviously. But I’ve started to see Harry rather than myself.”

Radcliffe’s racy role in the London stage production of “Equus,” in which he played a troubled stableboy who mutilates horses, was a departure from his wholesome image.

“There probably will be some people that never quite separate me from Harry,” he says of a post-Potter career. “I’m just going to get on with it.”

Rowling’s much anticipated seventh and final book — “Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows” — arrives July 21. Radcliffe will celebrate his 18th birthday two days later.

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