You once said that school was hard for you but you learned to love learning on the Harry Potter set. What do you feed your mind these days?
Daniel Radcliffe: I used to read a lot of fiction and now I read a lot of non-fiction. And I discovered a few blogs on Kinja that I like that just talk about interesting things—Deadspin is the one I got into it from, but [Kinja has] a blog for anything that you could possibly be interested in.

I also consume endless factual television programs. I have it in my head that if I go to bed watching something like [the Smithsonian Channel], I’ll retain it, and if I do it enough, then I’ll retain quite a lot, eventually. I was learning about Hittites last night. I remember thinking “That’s good that the Hittites have had a show,” because you don’t hear about them. All of the latest civilizations take their thunder away, but they were one of the first civilizations! They deserve a mention!

If you could pick any time to go back and visit, which would it be?
Dan: I would like to see the moment when Neanderthals and **** erectus interacted—that far back. That’s the kind of history that I find most fascinating, because those are the moments when you see things developing that are recognizably and uniquely human. If you go back to any other time, sure, the clothes are nice, but there’s typhoid and cholera! A brutal, short Neanderthal life to the age of 35 was probably what we were designed for.

Let’s say ghosts are real. Which historical figure would you want to haunt you?
Dan: Napoleon, or some other historical figure with a huge ego. Because you don’t want a mopey ghost. I’d quite like to meet John Keats, but I get the idea that his ghost would probably be very sad. Whereas, I imagine Napoleon’s would just be still raging and angry.

What are you reading right now?
Dan: Right now, I’m reading—I can’t believe I never read it before now—Slaughterhouse Five. Any kind of story where the author thinks, “Well, I can do whatever I like because I’m writing a book; I don’t have to be totally realistic; I can deal with this in as crazy a way as possible”—I enjoy that.

What’s the weirdest book on your bookshelf?
Dan: I had a book bought for me called The Cows, because my character in [The Cripple of Inishmaan], Billy, people talked about him staring at cows a lot. And there was this book written by a MacArthur Fellow [Lydia Davis]—obviously a serious writer, a really amazing writer. But she just wrote this very long prose poem about three cows outside her window. I won’t lie, I probably won’t read it cover to cover.

Which language?
Dan: I’m trying to learn Japanese. Just to speak. There’s a film I hope to do called Tokyo Vice that has Japanese lines that my character speaks, and he’s supposed to be fairly fluent. I could just learn it totally phonetically, but I do want to have some idea of what I’m saying.

Japanese is very onomatopoeic. The word for wind is pyu pyu and if you want to upgrade that to a storm, you use gyu gyu. Hop is pyon pyon, and my favorite Japanese word is tokidoki, which means “sometimes” but it sounds like “hokey dokey.” There’s a thing you have to do in Japanese a lot which is quite fun—sometimes they'll take a modern Western word and just make it sound Japanese because they haven’t got a word for it for themselves. The word for granola bar is gar-a-nola bar, and McDonald’s is Mac-uh-Donna-roo-doh. I’ve got an amazing teacher, this guy called Shinsuke, and he’s great. I don’t know when I’ll get to use any of it, but I am enjoying it.

You’ve worked with a lot of different kinds of animals—cats, dogs, owls, and now a snake on Horns. Are you a cat guy, a dog guy, a snake guy?
Dan: I'm a dog guy, and I'm actually kind of a snake guy now. I ended up loving that snake on Horns. They’re really sweet after a while, especially because when they get cold, they just love your warm body—the colder they get, the more they kind of hang on to you. Princess Leia was the name of the snake in Horns— she got carried around in a Star Wars pillowcase—and she would do amazing things on camera that you couldn’t train a snake to do, like wrap around one of my horns [in the movie]. At that point I went “OK, Alex, I think she’s going to break the horn off.” The snake’s just trying to move, and you feel that power suddenly—like “OK, you can kill me if you wanted to.” I really enjoyed the snakes on Horns. They were almost like the ultimate prop. You don’t have to act menacing—you have a python around your neck.

In Harry Potter, you had a lightning scar on your forehead. For Frankenstein, which is out next year, you wore hair extensions, and for this movie, you wore horns. What’s more annoying to have applied?
Dan: One hundred percent hair extensions. The lightning scar, on the first two films, we essentially painted it on, and after that we used Pros-Aide, which was like a glue [to put it on]. It was very simple. The horns were basically on a wire cage, and we hid the metal under the hair and then blended in the front. But the hair extensions took 14 hours to put in across two days and were a nightmare to live with and wash for the five months I had them. They're supposed to take 4 to 5 hours to take out, but I think we did them in two because I was just ripping them out of my head.

You’re slated to play Washington Roebling in a movie about the Brooklyn Bridge, which must be pretty cool for a history buff. When you're preparing to play an actual person, do you research a lot?
Dan: Yeah, absolutely you have to—I would feel weird not doing that. One of the great things about playing someone who is real is that a lot of the work has generally been done for you. There are tons of Allen Ginsberg autobiographies that I could look at [to play the poet in Kill Your Darlings]; his diaries actually were the main thing I looked at. It's about reading as much about the man and the history and the period as you possibly can. It's also one of the fun parts of the job, learning about your character—particularly when it's a real person and you find out interesting bits of information and you think “Oh, maybe we can work that into the story.”

The story of the Roeblings and the Brooklyn Bridge—I really hope we to get to tell that story. It's an amazing American story, and a story about a marriage that was so different from what people expected of a marriage in that time. That's why I think it’s particularly an important story to tell: Emily [Roebling] for the first half of the script is very much the sort of doting wife in a period film, and then you see her build the bridge. The equality in their marriage and the way they needed each other, and were so open about needing each other, feels very rare—like a story we don't often hear about in that era. I have kind of fallen in love with New York and so to make something that feels like a love letter to America but also very specific to New York as well, and what New York is to America … I hope it happens. It'll be great. It's a fantastic script.