Dan raved about his Epilogue family. He sounds so proud!
(laughs) He embarrassed me by how paternal he was. He really struck up a bond within four or five minutes… and he was asking them, “Do you need a drink? Do you need to go to the toilet?” and holding their hands to the toilet… good Lord.

And how about yours?
Great fun! Young Bertie [Gilbert], I believe, is the young guy we had. It’s a lot of fun when they were bringing them in for the first few times… so they brought in three or four and asked if I could go and sit and chat with them for ten minutes. Obviously you’re not really asking them if they can act but whether they would just… having them react with the camera in front of their face and with all the people around them. So it’s more about one person sticking a camera in front of their face and me just kind of talk to them about school and stuff.

And I feared that it was going to be really easy because I enjoy talking to children of that age, I find it really interesting what they’re into… but I find it really bizarre because he was sitting on the same couch where I was sitting ten years ago, being asked the questions, because when you audition they’re just throwing questions at you, to see what you say so I was kind of a little bit stuck with him and didn’t know what to ask him, or what to say. Luckily, he was a talker. It was kind of strange. I felt like I’ve grown up before my time, really, to see… to be looking back and thinking, “God, that was me 10 years ago.”

And your lovely wife…
Yes, we were very blessed with this. It was sprung on me completely. The director and the producers asked whether my girlfriend would do it – she’s been working on the films over the last four so they’re very familiar with her. They had to twist her arm for quite a bit.

She’s a bit camera shy, to say the least, so she wasn’t too keen on it but I actually warmed to the idea and thought we could have a lot of fun. She was great with kids so she got on very well with our young Scorpius. We had a lot of fun, actually. It was 3 days of giggles. A chance for her to see how I look like 20 years on… needless to say the years were not kind to me.

She looked lovely…
Yeah. The women look great. The lads not so much…

If you could rewrite that ending, would you?
(laughs) I wouldn’t touch a page. I have never even thought about it. I think if you were given all the time in the world, you still probably couldn’t have come up with something even half as good. So I dare not touch a classic.

But wasn’t he treated sort of unfairly?
Damn right! He doesn’t even get any girlfriend… what’s up with that?! (laughs) We’ve actually talked about this as well – Daniel and I have said that Harry and Draco are like two sides of the same coin. But Harry has all these fantastic influences – Dumbledore, Hagrid, his great friends – whereas Draco just has the worst of the worst.

Certainly the worst parents and Auntie Bellatrix is pretty mad. And Voldemort, again, is not the nicest soul in the world. So, yeah, Christmas was a real drag for Draco, as you can imagine, it wasn’t much fun for him. I guess he’s kind of a victim of his circumstances. He wasn’t born evil, he’s been thrust into this horribly world unwillingly.