AFTER eight years as the boy wizard, Daniel Radcliffe speaks tells Charles Miranda and Lachlan Cartwright why he still loves Harry Potter.

HIS last film may have entertained millions of fans worldwide and grossed more than $1 billion, but don't for a moment mention the word blockbuster to Daniel Radcliffe.

"I hate that word so much,'' the 19-year-old actor says.

"Blockbusters - it's horrible because you think of this week's blockbusters, but it's just crap and it makes it sound like another action movie or just some other crowd pleaser.''

Blockbuster or not, in July the British actor will appear again on the big screen as the bespectacled boy wizard in Harry Potter and the Half-Blood Prince and no doubt have fans queuing around the block of the cinema to see him.

The Harry Potter phenomena has been as much about the success of the J.K. Rowling series of books as it has the movie series that now spans eight years and each year attracts legions of new fans.

Radcliffe has starred in other films, such as playing a 1960s orphan in the Australian-made December Boys, and has even done a nude scene on stage in his acclaimed performance as a disturbed stablehand in West End and Broadway productions of Equus.

But despite fears of being typecast, it's his portrayal of the young wizard he keeps coming back to.

The first instalment of the series - Harry Potter and the Philosopher's Stone - had a fresh-faced 11-year-old Radcliffe playing a naive 10-year-old who enters a fantasy world of magic and wonder.

But as he grew older so, too, did his character, who also became wiser to the darkness of sorcery and the evil underbelly surrounding Hogwarts School of Witchcraft and Wizardry.

It's that evolution of darkness in his character that Radcliffe says has kept him excited about returning to the role, with the Half-Blood Prince now the sixth film in the planned series of eight.

It has been a maturing of a character as much as it has been of the actor and, he says, a script that has kept pace with fans' demands.

"I wouldn't be there still after eight years if I didn't love what I did and didn't want to invest a lot of myself into what I'm doing,'' he says.

"Neither would the rest of the crew who have stood by the films for eight years.''

Harry Potter and the Half-Blood Prince sees Potter return for his sixth year at Hogwarts where he discovers a book that seemingly explains the past that will help him battle with Lord Voldemort.

There is also emerging romantic confusion of mid-adolescence involving Hermione Granger (played by Emma Watson) and the usual array of strange beasts and magic.

Despite some criticism that the films had become too scary for the children they were initially made for, The Half-Blood Prince is expected to meet audiences half-way.

"I think the thing we certainly tried to do in this one was strike a balance between the darkness,'' Radcliffe says.

"I mean, the one thing when I read the script I could always yearn for was more darkness and more of that real intense stuff, because I enjoy doing that more, but hopefully this time we have struck a balance between that darkness and a certain comedy in this film.

"And what I think we've managed to do is not make it that kind of comedy that is farcical and pulling faces.

"It's not that kind of comedy at all, it's much more subtle than that and hopefully people will find it funny - that's the aim anyway.''

Radcliffe loves Australia and, in particular, Melbourne, where his parents own a flat in Toorak.

He says the easygoing Australian approach to life had taught him the balance between work and play.

Such is his fondness for the country he even spent months learning the accent so as to not infuriate Australian audiences watching December Boys, released in late 2007.

"People do Steve Irwin and Crocodile Dundee and never actually think about how the sounds are made.

"My teacher told me to imagine you are talking with sand blowing into your eyes. I trained for about six months so I could do it, because I didn't want to do a crap one because your country must be sick of them,'' he says.

"I'm sick of hearing people do bad English accents - it drives me up the wall. So for me to actually have a chance to make sure I did an accent justice was actually quite fun.''

There are no plans for any more Australian films, with Radcliffe preparing for the seventh Harry Potter film, to be released in 2010.

The film version of the epic final book Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows has been split into two films and the second instalment will be released the following year. Films he believes will grow in popularity.

"I think when the fans came on to the first film there would have been a section of the audience that didn't want to like it because they were the purists of the book,'' he says.

"There are still those people out there, but you are never going to change their minds so just don't even try.

"So I think the majority of the people out there, because the fan base has grown at about the rate the films have come out, we've managed to keep making them darker and dark enough to maintain the interests of these people.

"And I think actually through making the films darker we've gained a lot. And also through people like (director) David Yates directing them, a certain amount of respect has been gained for the films as cinema.''

Harry Potter and the Half-Blood Prince was to have been released last November, but in what some film commentators have described as a publicity stunt by Warner Bros it was suddenly pulled and rescheduled for release in July.

A trailer of the film was released last month on the web as the beginning of a multi-million-dollar publicity campaign.

Harry Potter and the Half-Blood Prince is released on July 16.