What is it about the allegory that Joe Hill created in the novel that was then translated into the script that let you come back and be serpentine in a role with a little biblical fare?
Dan Radcliffe: I suppose because Joe’s world is in and of itself so striking and real and exciting that there was never a moment where I was thinking … and you know, of course, I think because Potter was such a part of my life I never think of the comparisons other people might make or similarities that might be drawn. The thing that attracted me to it was just the fact that it was so bold and so heartbreaking and beautiful. And this guy’s journey was something that I really connected to. And I feel that the allegory of turning into what you are perceived as or feeling like an outsider or being made to be like an outsider is very strong, and something that I – and hopefully a lot of people – can connect to. And yet, there was, as you said, such delight in springing from style to genre. And it was so witty at the same time as being so dark. And the love story obviously is so poignant – there was so much going on that it was exciting.

Was it fun having your reporters attack each other?
Dan Radcliffe: Yeah, absolutely. That’s a great scene. I won’t lie. I took no small pleasure in it – a moment of catharsis. It’s one of the fun parts of the film, as well. And it’s great that you have all those great, fun moments in the film because the film also takes some dark, heavy turns, as well. I promise you I don’t think of you all in that way, but if I could hand pick five or six journalists from the UK and arrange a cage fight, I would.

Joe Hill: Do you ever read the Daily Mail? Who writes their headlines? Austin Powers? Every headline is like a stale double entendre from 1973.

Dan Radcliffe: That’s what’s so frustrating for me, is that the Daily Mail website, I believe, is the most trafficked news website from the UK. So that’s why a lot of people, I think, think that’s how we think as a country – which I’d like to say, is not the case.

Daniel, tell us about wearing the horns. Were they heavy? How long did they take to put on? After awhile did they start to look normal when you looked in the mirror?
Dan Radcliffe: They looked really normal, and like really quickly – that was what was remarkably about them. Whenever you see a line in a script that says the character has horns, you go, “Okay, well great.” In my imagination, that’s fantastic. But how will it actually look? So the first time I saw them on it was a combination of relief, because they looked fantastic, and excitement. Because when you have something stuck to your head, that can go either way. That has the potential to look silly. And it really doesn’t. The word ‘organic’ is one of my most hated overused words, but they do in that they look like they’re made out of organic material, and actually coming from my head. They only took like 20 minutes to put on. They were really fast; they were very light. The make-up guys, Mike McCarthy and Mike Fields … they did my make up for the job and (to Joe) they did your horns when you came out to set for the day.

Joe Hill: Yeah, I had the horns on and, you know, they go so well with almost anything. They accessorize nicely with formal wear ...

Dan Radcliffe: We were coming up the other day with, if this were a longer story and Ig went into the mundanity of life, they’d probably be used for taking dry cleaning back and coat hangers and things like that. They’re a very functional piece of headwear.

Juno Temple: Think of a proposal; you could put a ring on it.

Dan Radcliffe: Yeah, put a ring on it!

At the core of it, there’s a fantastic story but then when you add everything else onto it – the horns and these fantastical elements … how much more intriguing did that make it to you? If that had not been there, would you still have wanted to do this story?
Dan Radcliffe: You actually made a really great point. The story, without all the other amazing, symbolic visual elements to it, it’s a great story.

Juno Temple: A love story.

Dan Radcliffe: This love story; sort of the idealized, wonderful, love’s young dream that then got to grow up and still be together – and the story of that falling away – is of itself a compelling enough story. I think when you add the elements of the horns and the powers that the horns give him, that brings obviously an extra visual element of excitement, but also – to me – I’ve always enjoyed magical realism, and that’s how I viewed this script originally as just being the whole world is very, very grounded in reality with this one extraordinary, insane thing happening in the middle of it, which is everything else is hurtling around him.

I’m curious about your experience working with the snakes?
Daniel Radcliffe: They were fantastic. Actually I didn’t know before the movie if I was comfortable with snakes. It turns out I’m extremely comfortable with snakes. I may have been completely projecting human emotions onto this creature, but I became completely convinced that she was very affectionate by the end. They get cold. Snakes aren’t cold-blooded. This was my favorite word I learnt on the shoot: they’re pochelothermic, which means they can’t control they’re body temperature – so whatever temperature it is outside, they will be. So they’re freezing and you’re really warm, so they love you and they just hug you – but not in a constrictive kind of way. So I really like them. We had one scene with a hundred live snakes, which was awesome.

In this movie your characters are also played by actors at a younger age …
Dan Radcliffe: I got to spend quite a lot of time with Mitchell [Kummen] on the movie. It was funny because Sabrina [Carpenter] is from LA, I think, who plays the younger [Merrin] and she is like thirteen going on twenty-one, incredibly mature and well above her years. And Mitchell is like I was. He’s a kid.

Juno Temple: It’s quite unnerving how much they look like us, too.

Daniel Radcliffe: Mitch is blonde naturally – got a much fairer head than I do – and they dyed his hair on the first day. And he went back to his hotel in Vancouver and nobody knew what he was doing and one of the girls in reception said, “Oh, you look like Harry Potter.” It made his day. He was so happy. It’s a very hard job on the casting department to cast somebody to play young me when everybody knows exactly what I looked like at that age. They did a brilliant job.

The other thing that was interesting about us and our American counterparts who played the younger versions of us was that Alex [Aja, director] wanted one shot of us – because he had this shot that he filmed before we got there of the three kids, Sabrina, Dylan [Schmid] and Mitch - all riding bikes through the forest. He was like, “I want to recreate that with all you riding bikes in the forest ten years later.” And neither me, Juno nor Max Minghella can ride a bike. Which I would never admit to, normally, but because we can admit to it together it makes it a lot less weird.

Juno Temple: We also can’t drive cars either.

Daniel Radcliffe: Although we’re getting close. We both passed our permit test … on the same day. Ready yourself, America. We’re going to be on the road soon.

Is there a direct through line from learning your lines as an actor to actually being a good and efficient rapper?
Daniel Radcliffe: (laughs) I don’t think so. I don’t know if the two are connected. Maybe the fact that I learn lines a lot helped me learn that song? I do take things in orally very well.

Juno Temple:[/b] (confused) I don’t know …

Daniel Radcliffe: We’ve just been on a plane since last night. (to Juno) I went on the Fallon show and did a rap song. It was amazing. I said in an interview ages ago … it was one of those things like, “Tell us something we don’t know about you.” So I’m really struggling at this point to find something you don’t know about me, so, “Well, I know all the words to ‘Alphabet Aerobics’ by Blackalicious. Then [a producer] on Fallon caught me up while we were doing press for “What If” and was like, “Could you do that on the show?” I said, “I don’t know.” I sort of freaked out. But when we came to do [press for Horns] this time, we was like, “The Roots really want to do it with you.” So I was like, “Okay.” But what I didn’t realize was that I went and did the rehearsal and then Questlove came back in the dressing room was like, “Yeah, man, I’m gonna text those guys. They’re gonna be really excited. I produced their second album.” So I was like, “Okay … you’re like friends with these guys.” So I might not have been as bold to suggest it if I’d known that, but I’m amazingly glad I did it. I was like shaking with adrenaline for a couple of minutes afterwards. It was awesome.

What was it like driving around in an old AMC Gremlin? And is it your car of choice now?
Dan Radcliffe: You know, it kind of would be. I love that car. To me, that’s a really cool car. I’m not going to be one of these people who, when I do pass my test, gets a crazy fast, elaborate car. A good piece I was given once was: When you’re buying a car, buy a car you feel comfortable sitting in traffic in. If you’re in a Ferrari in traffic, you’re not going to look cool. I really did enjoy it. It was also very cool seeing it go into a river. My main focus through all the driving scenes was just don’t break the car. Don’t crash it. We had to drive into this woman’s driveway and she had loads of lawn ornaments and stuff. It was no good. Hitting a mark in a car is a horrible thing, especially if you’re not good at it, because you know that all the other men on set drive. So literally everyone said, “Can I just do this? Can you just let me do this, please, because he’s screwing it up.” It’s not my favorite, but I’m taking my test at the end of the month. I’ve booked it.

Iggy had to drive with the snake on his neck.
Dan Radcliffe:That was actually one of my favorite moments from any film that I’ve ever done. We had this one shot in the movie where I’m driving along, the snake’s around my neck, I pull up, get out of the car, walk over to the cop car and do a scene with them. But I couldn’t drive with the snake around my neck because the snake latches onto the gear stick and the steering wheel and stuff, so that’s annoying. So we had to have somebody in the back of the car who would put the snake around my neck before I got out. They have to hide down in the back of the car with a python. And Brad [McDonald], who was our snake handler, had a wooden leg. Most of one of his legs was wooden, so it was very hard for him to get into the back of the car, so that job had to get delegated to somebody else who is not normally in the snake handling department. It was Cory, who is one of our set dec guys. I remember him getting into the back of the car with the snake and us getting into our first position. I just turned around to him and I was like, “I should probably tell him…” I’m like, “Cory, just so you know – I don’t have a license. I don’t drive.” And he was like, “Oh, that’s fine. I’ve never handled snakes before.” Moments like that make the film industry the best thing to work in in the world.

The love scenes … how did you guys approach it among yourselves?
Daniel Radcliffe: It’s just easier when you get on with the person you’re doing it with. I’ve been fortunate in that I’ve never really had to do – certainly never a scene like that – with somebody I didn’t … although on Kill Your Darlings I was doing a scene …

Juno Temple: Was it your first female sex scene?

Daniel Radcliffe: You were my first female sex scene, yeah. (laughs) Totally. But on Kill Your Darlings the character who my character had sex with was not a principal character in the film so as much as I got to know Olin, who was the guy, a little bit. It was still very nerve wracking because essentially you’ve just met for the first time and now that’s all you’re doing. So definitely this was a much better experience having got to know somebody a bit first. There’s emotionally intense sex scenes, and then there’s lovely sex scenes. This was kind of one of them, I guess. Better than “Equus.”

You weren’t nervous at all?
Daniel Radcliffe: I think we’ve both done quite a bit of this kind of stuff. I was really nervous with my first ever one, but you do – not to say you get totally blase – but it’s just part of the job.

Do you remember when you consciously starting trying to bring some craft to the things that you were doing, growing up as actors and finding your way?
Dan Radcliffe: I think it was very, very gradual for me, and in several different stages that are still going on. It’s constant learning. I think fourteen was probably the age where I was first like, “Okay, I want to really have a go at this. I really want to do this for the rest of my life.” I think you’re old enough to know that by then. And really, I don’t think that I got any solid, technical grounding until I was preparing for “Kill Your Darlings” really, just after “How to Succeed. That’s where I was taught how to break down a script, just into very basic stuff like: What does the character want to have in the scene? What are you trying to do to the other character when you say that line? It is all very basic, but I’d never learned it before. So I found that stuff incredibly helpful going forward over the last few years.

What are the main things that go into your decision-making process these days of whether to get involved in a project?
Dan Radcliffe: For me it’s just: Will I get to do something I’ve never done before? Am I excited about the people I’m getting to work with? Those are the two things, I guess, at the moment for me. Will I get a chance to do something new, and who am I doing it with? That’s it, really.