Daniel Radcliffe sat down with his former costar Helena Bonham Carter to interview the actress for the May issue of Interview magazine, where the elder gave a few tips to the young star about growing up in show business, discussed their times on the set of the Harry Potter series, and commented on her upcoming films, Tim Burton's Dark Shadows and Mike Newell's Great Expectations. A few highlights of the five-page interview, conducted by Dan, can be read below; the full session can be found here.

DANIEL RADCLIFFE: You have quite an overachieving family.

HELENA BONHAM CARTER: Do you think so?

RADCLIFFE: Well, you're descended from a prime minister, several politicians, and a very influential director. And your maternal granddad was a Spanish diplomat who was awarded the Righteous Among the Nations a few years ago, which is amazing. And your mother is a psychotherapist.

BONHAM CARTER: Wow. You know more than I do.

RADCLIFFE: But that intellectual milieu—how did that launch you? Because you did start young.

BONHAM CARTER: It was nothing to do with where I came from, in the sense that mum and dad never brought us up with any kind of pressure. There weren't any expectations, which was great. But I was incredibly self-critical and very driven. Thank god I got slightly less self-critical as I got older.

RADCLIFFE: Have you then? Does that go slightly?

BONHAM CARTER: Oh yes. Don't worry. It's so much better when you get older.

RADCLIFFE: Oh, thank god.

BONHAM CARTER: I think you physically fall apart. But mentally, it's so much easier.

RADCLIFFE: I certainly suffer from a slight inferiority complex when I step into a room of other actors because I've never trained, and I know you haven't either.

BONHAM CARTER: Oh, I had a big inferiority complex till yesterday.

RADCLIFFE: But not today!

BONHAM CARTER: Everybody has an inferiority complex when they step into a room. But then when you have children and you get older, it doesn't really matter. When I was young I had so many inferiority complexes. I had an inferiority complex because I didn't go to university. I had an inferiority complex because I didn't train. Then it gets tiring. And you do get bored of it.

RADCLIFFE: Your Harry Potter character, Bellatrix Lestrange, is one of the scariest characters in the books. But I think it's fair to say that she is very playful and quite sexy as well.

BONHAM CARTER: When they sent the part, I thought, What am I going to do here? Because, actually, on the page, she wasn't all there, so I thought, Well, you've got to be noticed. And Bellatrix-kids were terrified of her. So I think, Okay, I've got to be scary. But then also, if you're with kids, you want to have fun being naughty.

RADCLIFFE: Do you think you take inspiration from kids a lot? Because I do. They're very honest in how they act and how they are in the world.

BONHAM CARTER: Oh, yeah. They are. And I also think there's a lot of Peter Pan about me anyway. I never really wanted to grow up. I grew up really young. I moved out when I was 13-that's when I started acting. Dad was really ill-he was pretty much paralyzed—so there was a part of me that felt like I had to become responsible.

BONHAM CARTER: [in Southern drawl] If all else fails, that's my fallback situation.

RADCLIFFE: Is that your Southern accent?

I do think that really messed with my head, being well-known young, when you really don’t know who you are.

BONHAM CARTER: It's for a part. You get to research things like this. The great thing about our job is that it makes us do stuff we're naturally too lazy to do. I'm proud of myself that I'm finally doing tap lessons. That was a New Year's resolution. I thought, "Just do it! When are you going to make the time?"

RADCLIFFE: Absolutely. And there's a lot of wooden floors in this house, so you can go to town. What's your relationship with musicals? Did you listen to them growing up?

BONHAM CARTER: I love musicals. Honestly, I'd always wanted to be in a musical, and I'd always wanted to be Mrs. Lovett [her role in Sweeney Todd], so when Tim said, "I'm going to make it, but you can audition if you want, you know . . .

RADCLIFFE: I remember you practicing singing.

BONHAM CARTER: Yes, again, you were there!

RADCLIFFE On the fifth [Harry Potter] film. I remember thinking, What is going to happen to Tim if she doesn't get this part? I think it's important to say you were also auditioning for [Stephen] Sondheim [a co-author of the original musical who was consulted for Burton's film]. And that's incredibly tough. What was that experience like?

BONHAM CARTER: It was one of the worst humps in our marriage. Not that we're married, but it's really hard—

RADCLIFFE: That's so brilliant. So can you talk about Dark Shadows? 'Cause I don't know the series really—

BONHAM CARTER: I didn't know it. I knew that Tim used to race home when he was a school kid and watch Dark Shadows, which was this really crappy soap opera-sort of Gothic soap opera, but it's all set around 1970. It's basically about Barnabus Collins, an unhappy vampire—a reluctant vampire.

It’s Tim Burton. He’s a genius. You can’t turn him down just because you go out with him and have two children together.

RADCLIFFE: Oh, cool! And you play Dr. Julia Hoffman?

BONHAM CARTER: I play the resident psychiatrist, who's an alcoholic. There's this sort of odd family . . . Barnabus Collins is resurrected from his coffin, and he comes back to his family. He's been away for 200 years. And Michelle Pfeiffer is, I guess, his great-niece by seven times.

RADCLIFFE: Excellent.

BONHAM CARTER: It was kind of worrying when I read it, because there's a sexy witch part. At the beginning of the film, before casting, Tim said, "I think we should take a break, because you get to work with all these other directors and I never get to work with other actors." I said, "Fine, absolutely understand it. Let's just be grown-up about it." And then [producer] Dick Zanuck—he's the most amazing man. He's 77, he's Daryl Zanuck's son, and he has produced flops, sensations—Jaws, The Sound of Music. I mean, he's a legend. So I'm on the Golden Globe red carpet, unfortunately dressed as usual, and Dick comes up to me—

RADCLIFFE: Oh, was this the different shoes?

BONHAM CARTER: Yeah. But you know, it was good because how do you do the carpet for an hour and half? So I thought, [forget] it. I looked at the dress and I thought, It's not gonna be well received, so let's just distract. At least you've got some control, you know?

RADCLIFFE: That's, frankly, inspired.

BONHAM CARTER: So Dick comes up to me and says, "Have you read it?" And I said, "Yeah, but he doesn't want me to be in it." He said, "No, no. You're the doctor . . . " I said, "Angélique, the sexy witch, right?" He said, "No, not Angélique. You're Dr. Hoffman." Doctor Hoffman! An alcoholic psychiatrist.

RADCLIFFE: Right, so you had pictured other actresses?

BONHAM CARTER: Well, I had, but I also thought, What is it about an alcoholic psychiatrist that makes you naturally think Helena?




RADCLIFFE: Tell me about your part in Great Expectations [director Mike Newell's forthcoming adaptation].

BONHAM CARTER: Miss Havisham—I mean, it's fantastic. I did it for the dress, too. It's because she's the bride, Miss Havisham. It was a tiny budget-I loved it, though. And I love Mike, his energy.

RADCLIFFE: He's the most English man you'll ever meet, in a way. So you did it mainly for the dress? It's the story of a woman who's always in a wedding gown.

BONHAM CARTER: Always expecting, yes. She's been jilted. And she stays in her wedding gown, and just waits and waits.

RADCLIFFE: You are going to be amazing as that.

BONHAM CARTER: Well, I did love it. It's funny, because I never want to repeat myself—and I thought, Oh, it's just an older version of Bellatrix, with the hair. But you always start from the inside out.

RADCLIFFE: You have cornered the niche on these kind of high-impact characters.

BONHAM CARTER: I hope. Because that's all I can do.

RADCLIFFE: It's worth pointing out to the reader that the reason you and I know each other a bit better than say, I know a lot of other actors, is because we had the same people doing our hair and makeup every day, so we would be swapping chairs.

BONHAM CARTER: And stories, and many things. I was most of the time making sure no one was coming in, so you could have a fag out the window.

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