JK Rowling is so impressed by Daniel Radcliffe’s nude scenes in ‘Equus’ that she is tempted to see him strip off for the next instalment of the boy wizard franchise.

Radcliffe said that after seeing the West End show, Rowling came backstage to tell him that he was going to be naked all the time in the next Potter film.

“When Jo came to see me in Equus she popped backstage afterwards and told me: ‘In the next film, Harry’s going to be naked all of the time!’” Contactmusic quoted Radcliffe, as saying. Radcliffe, who has made his mark at West End, is also planning to do the same on Broadway.

The actor earlier confirmed that he would be making his debut on the American stage when the play Equus goes to the Big Apple next year.

Publisher delays Potter reference work After being sued by JK Rowling, a publisher has agreed to delay its plans to release an encyclopedic reference work on the fictitious world of the Harry Potter novels.

RDR Books Publisher Roger Rapoport said he volunteered to halt typesetting on the planned “Harry Potter Lexicon” until a judge rules on whether the work constitutes a violation of Rowling’s intellectual property rights, or the copyright on her novels held by Warner Bros.

The book, drawn on material from the fan-created Harry Potter Lexicon Web site, had been scheduled for release on Nov. 28.
A federal judge in New York gave force to the agreement by issuing an order Thursday barring completion, distribution, marketing or advance sales of the book until further notice.

Rapoport, whose small company is based in Muskegon, Mich., said he had also turned over a copy of the Lexicon to Warner Bros. lawyers, in the hopes that they would read it and decide that it didn’t amount to copyright infringement.
“I think they should drop it. I’m hopeful that they will,” he said.

The lawsuit, filed Oct. 31, sought an injunction blocking publication of the book because it was likely to borrow too heavily from Rowling’s work and interfere with her plans to eventually publish her own version of an encyclopedia on the wizarding world. The suit was somewhat of a surprise because Rowling had been a supporter of the Lexicon Web site, which would contain much of the same material. But she and Warner Bros. said they saw a difference between fans publishing such information for free on the Web, and putting it into a book for commercial sale.

In a statement released on her Web site, Rowling said she took “no pleasure” in the prevention of the Lexicon’s publication.
“On the contrary, I feel massively disappointed that this matter had to come to court at all,” the statement said. “Given my past good relations with the Lexicon fan site, I can only feel sad and disillusioned that this is where we have ended up.”
The seventh and final installment in Rowling’s hugely successful series, “Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows,” was published in July. The seven books have sold nearly 400 million copies and have been translated into 64 languages.

Fans have waited a long time to see Harry Potter’s kiss on the big screen. Now, with the fifth film ready and set to hit cinema screens next year, the wait will soon be over. And to give fans a feel of what Harry’s first kiss is like, Studio Warner Brothers has released a still from the movie showing the boy wizard locking lips with his first girlfriend.

Potter star, Daniel Radcliffe and his co-star Katie Leung, who plays his crush Cho Chang in ‘Harry Potter and the Order of the Phoenix’, reportedly enjoyed the scene so much, that they needed 30 attempts to get it right.

However, Radcliffe laughed off the reports, and revealed that though the kissing scene had required 30 takes, there was nothing unusual about the number, for normal scenes require that many takes as well.

“It was reported that we did a huge amount of takes, but actually you do that number on any scene. Once you have covered it from all the camera angles you’ve done about 30 takes,” the Daily Mail quoted him, as saying. “But because it’s the kiss, it was sort of made out that I had requested to do well over 30 takes,” he said. And though he admits that the scene was “nerve wracking”, he insists that having to kiss someone he didn’t like would have been a worse experience. “It would have been more nerve wracking if I was doing it with someone I didn’t like,” Radcliffe said.

And if nothing else about the movie works, the young actor is sure that the publicity the kissing scene has got will make sure that fans flock to theatres once the movie is released. “I guess if there’s one thing that people will be coming to see the film for, it will be the kiss,” he said. ‘Harry Potter and the Order of the Phoenix’ hits theatres the world over in July next year.

TheHimalayanTimes.com

While her creation Harry Potter battles evil on paper, author JK Rowling has also fought and won a battle of hers in the real world. The British author took on and managed to defeat Iranian cybersquatters who set up a website claiming to be her own.

The owners of site, JKRowling.ir – known only as Hostine.bet, had alleged that their site was “JK Rowling’s official site”, reports Contactmusic. Apparently Rowling did not quite like the idea that someone else was laying claim to her name in such a manner and so she took legal action against the owners. Rowling’s challenge paid off when domain name lawyers ruled in her favour, passing the site over to the much-loved author.

Rowling is currently working on the seventh and final book in the Harry Potter series, which fans are not only looking forward to but also dreading for there is a chance that the author might kill of her lead character.

TheHimalayanTimes.com