Watson is slated to shoot her first leading-lady role this fall, the period drama Napoleon and Betsy, and plans to enroll at Cambridge. She says the stable, nurturing environment established by Columbus and Heyman is ''the reason Dan, Rupert, and I aren't completely insane.'' Or at least not insane in a bad way. Grint is one delightfully quirky dude — a guy who drives an ice cream truck, plays the didgeridoo, and claims The Joy of Painting as his favorite TV show. He's no longer a kid, but that doesn't mean he's quite ready to leave Potter behind. ''It's going to be sad when it's over,'' Grint says. ''I'll be 22. It's been such a big part of my life — half my life, actually, by the time we finish. Hopefully, I'll do other stuff when this is over.''
The future weighs on all of them, none more so than Radcliffe. Committed to making acting his profession, he's taken a spate of work recently that's decidedly outside the Potter universe — most notably his emotionally and physically naked West End theater debut in Equus, which earned him admiring reviews during its blockbuster London run last year. (He'll be reprising the role in New York on Broadway beginning Sept. 5.) ''If I had just done these films without doing anything else, I would have become very frustrated, and would have started worrying more about the pressure of life after Potter,'' Radcliffe says. He hopes that his extracurricular acting will ''ease the public into the idea that I am going to be doing other things.''
Still, it will be a while before Radcliffe knows whether his exit strategy has succeeded. At the very least, he can say that his stage work has prepared him for Hallows, which begins shooting next spring. The young actor says he's most looking forward to the haunting, emotional sequence in which Harry walks through a forest toward his final confrontation with Voldemort, accompanied by the ghosts of Sirius Black, his parents, and others. He's also excited to shoot Harry's last, dreamy encounter with Dumbledore, although he recently reread the sequence in the book and made the surprising discovery that Harry is naked during the scene. ''At first, I thought I had pants on,'' Radcliffe says. ''Apparently not.'' Is he nervous? ''Bah, I've sort of done that,'' he says, with mock bravado. ''It's all old hat now, really.''
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