"I can only take a certain amount of credit for inhabiting Dobby, because clearly these brilliant people at Industrial Light and Magic have created Dobby and I just voiced the character,” he humbly confessed. “[But] am always amazed and flattered at how much that character has endured even though he hasn’t been in any films for a while. Every time a book comes out people phone me, and write to me from around the world saying ‘He’s in! He is in!’"

This month, he started filming the sixth film, “Harry Potter and the Half-Blood Prince,” and he is committed to the seventh and final segment, “Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows,” expected to be released in 2010.

“Potter's a marathon, not a sprint, as the saying goes,” he said, and he expects to spend 9-½ hours a day on it for the next eight to 10 months. “We'll get a break at Christmas, and other than that, you're there. It's fun for me because I'm there every day, so you get in a rhythm, a very regular rhythm with it, so it's very easy to relax.”

Radcliffe jumps right back into the wizarding world next week, when he starts shooting "Harry Potter and the Half Blood Prince" on Monday. "It's pretty whirlwind," he said. "I stop press on the 14th and start on the 17th. There's just one week of rehearsal. That's manic. But when you know the character as well as I do, it's easy to get back into the role. So the amount of prep you do, it's possible to do a lot of what you need on the day of. It comes very naturally now."

Just because it's easy now doesn't mean he's not excited — especially about certain parts, such as being able to give Rupert Grint a hard time when it's his turn at a kissing scene. "I'm going to be on set pointing at him every time. It's going to be funny," Radcliffe grinned mischievously.

I actually wrote, in the front of my book, the exact time of me starting to read it. I think it was 9:30 at night on the 22nd of July, which was the day before my [18th] birthday. I read two chapters on that day, which wasn't very much at all, of course. About page 30, I got to. Then I actually didn't get to read [any of] it again for another couple of days. I started again on the 24th and 25th, and over those two days or so, I seemed to completely demolish it. I read 350 pages in one day at one point.

Leanne Greer of Canton, Georgia, had gone on ‘lockdown’ — no television, radio or Internet — after buying her copy of ‘Deathly Hallows’ at about 7 am Saturday.

She said she finished reading page 306, then discovered the next 33 pages of the book were missing. “I just kind of freaked out,” said Greer, a Purdue University graduate. Luckily for Greer, she had a backup for her store-bought copy; she had ordered another copy online. “I’m just that psychotic about it,” she said.