While the Potter films were earning him millions of adoring fans around the world, Radcliffe’s role as the bespectacled boy wizard was causing resentment at school.

However, with an estimated £30 million fortune in the bank and Hollywood at his feet – all before his 20th birthday – Radcliffe said his life is proof that that ‘uncool’ kids come out on top.

Your typical celebrity fluff. Then this:

Radcliffe has been reticent on the subject of religion in the past, but in an interview to promote the latest instalment in the film franchise, Harry Potter and the Half-Blood Prince, released on July 15, he said: “I’m an atheist, but I’m very relaxed about it. I don’t preach my atheism, but I have a huge amount of respect for people like Richard Dawkins who do. Anything he does on television, I will watch.”

He joked: “There we go, Dan, that’s half of America that’s not going to see the next Harry Potter film on the back of that comment.”

More from The Examiner. And the LATimes countdown to Harry Potter and the Half-Blood Princean has an “exclusive interview” of Ratcliffe, sans the atheist talk.

Via PZ Myers, “If only Radcliffe had an excuse to take his clothes off for atheism.”