Daniel Radcliffe in Harry Potter and the Order of the Phoenix © 2007 Warner Bros. Entertainment Inc. Harry Potter Publishing Rights © J.K.R. Harry Potter characters, names and related indicia are trademarks of and © Warner Bros. Entertainment Inc. All Rights Reserved.

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It seems that young Mr. Potter just hasn't suffered enough in his first four years at Hogwarts. By all accounts, year five, as detailed in "Harry Potter and the Order of the Phoenix" dispenses with the Scooby-Doo–style whodunits and gets down to some truly dire situations. With Lord Voldemort no longer having to rent someone else's head, Harry and his mates face a new cadre of villains, are forced to form new allegiances, and, naturally, learn that no spell can help with the trials of being a teenager.

Harry himself, Daniel Radcliffe, got serious with Premiere.com on the set of Order of the Phoenix to discuss its political undertones, the lessons he's learned so far, and Harry's first big-screen kiss.

PREMIERE.COM: With the arrival of new teacher Dolores Umbridge (franchise newcomer Imelda Staunton), things seems to be taking a decidedly political slant this time around.
DANIEL RADCLIFFE: It is sort of the influx of the right wing at the wizard world. You know, Jason Isaacs (Lucius Malfoy) and Helena Bonham Carter (making her first appearance in the film series as Bellatrix Lestrange) are, you know, they are the SS. They're [Joseph] Goebbels and [Hermann] Goering and all those people who are being made into docudramas at the moment on BBC. And Umbridge, 'cause she isn't actually linked to Voldemort, she's sort of like, I suppose, the people in power that are actually still quite right-wing conservative and actually have these mad motives of their own. She's a megalomaniac really. I mean, the most political stuff — the stuff that, you know, there is absolutely a certain amount of in the real world — is the battle between [Cornelius] Fudge and Dumbledore and that idea of, you know, a person in power in complete denial of the reality of a situation. So there's a huge political element to this one, which is one of the reasons that I think it could appeal more to older people. Kids, you know, when you're 11, generally speaking, you see goodies and baddies. You wouldn't necessarily see a difference between why Umbridge is bad and why Voldemort is bad.

So what does that make Harry in this kind of world? Who could we see as his political parallel?
The common man, I suppose. I don't know. I mean, Harry sort of does actually represent a huge amount of the people, you know, because he is the sort of person who actually sees what the government's doing, and sees no logical common sense in it, and feels, actually, that he's being proven powerless to do anything about it, which ultimately he is. The other thing I've compared Harry to in this one: He's like a Vietnam veteran. He's, you know, seen awful things and then come back into a society that's rejected him, which is what I think happens to him in this film. When he comes back into the normal world, he doesn't hear anything from his friends for months, and suddenly he goes into the wizard world and finds that he's been vilified all the time that he's not heard anything.