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LONDON — You can see it on their faces and hear it in most of their remarks: They're ready to move on with their lives.

After spending more than a decade together on a film set — for one very long saga —Daniel Radcliffe, Emma Watson and Rupert Grint, the Harry Potter "kids," are tackling adulthood, each pursuing a different path.

"When we finished each movie, it's always been 'I'll see you next year,' " says Radcliffe, 21, who has personified Harry since the 2001 beginning of the film series based on J.K. Rowling's seven books about the boy wizard at Hogwarts School of Witchcraft and Wizardry. "This feels very bizarre and strange."

"I've grown up doing this," says Watson, 20, who plays Harry's brainy friend Hermione Granger. "It doesn't feel like a job. It feels like part of my identity. No one else's childhood has been documented as much as ours."

"It's such a unique thing that we've shared over these years," says Grint, 22, who is Harry's best friend, Ron Weasley, in the films. "I feel quite lucky to have gone through this. When we were filming we'd see each other every day."

They've literally grown up before our eyes. Except for a couple of minimal re-shoots for the final installment of Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows, due July 15, filming wrapped last summer. The scene filmed on the final day was surprisingly anticlimactic.

"It's been such a long time," Grint says. "And it was such a random little scene. I was soaking wet. The three of us jump through a fireplace on a crash land, and that was it. It felt like it should be ending on something a bit more meaningful, but that's how it was."

Still, knowing they had completed shooting the seventh saga had a moving finality to it.

"It was really emotional," Grint says. "We all cried. The realization that we weren't going to be doing this anymore hit me quite hard."

Now, months later, the actors have reunited briefly to promote Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows, Part 1, which has ruled the box office since it opened Nov. 19. "We're all going in different directions," Grint says. "But we're definitely going to keep in touch. I can't imagine not."

"It's bittersweet," says Radcliffe, around whom the Potter universe has revolved. "I'm somewhere between sad, relieved and excited. We lasted 10 years, and I don't think anyone could have made them better than our directors, and we've been incredibly blessed with the casts. We had a good run, and I'm choosing to look at the wonderful things rather than the sadness."

Meanwhile, he has been shooting The Woman in Black, a thriller from Hammer Films in which he plays a young lawyer who travels to a remote village to organize a client's papers and discovers the ghost of a scorned woman. He also is preparing for his February Broadway musical debut as the lead character, J. Pierrepont Finch, in How to Succeed in Business (Without Really Trying).

"I'm the first person to play the role this young," he says. Previously, Finch has been played by Robert Morse and Matthew Broderick. "I think it adds a dimension when someone who's playing it is actually as young as the character," says Radcliffe, who has put in hours of singing and dance training. (In his spare time, Radcliffe is a music aficionado and plays the bass.)

The actor relishes playing someone as "manipulative and conniving and almost Falstaffian" as the ambitious Finch, a character who is light-years away from the idealistic and heroic Harry Potter.

"Everything Finch does is morally reprehensible," he says. "But you kind of back him. How to Succeed in Business is about somebody who never lets his morals get in the way of his ambition."

He's tickled by some of the unusual benefits that have come with playing Potter. He's the youngest non-royal to have his portrait hung in the National Portrait Gallery in London. And he was the first Western actor to attend his own film premiere in China. (It was for Harry Potter and the Chamber of Secrets, the second film.)

"That to me is kind of my coolest claim to fame," he says.

Watson shed her Potter image symbolically by lopping off Hermione's most distinctive feature — her long mane of thick hair.

"It'll be nice to get back in the library and just read a book," says Watson, a sophomore at Brown University in Rhode Island.

Having to travel between her very real Ivy League world and the magical realm in the past year has been surreal, she says. "It's very weird. I have to kind of like switch heads. Sometimes I manage it seamlessly, and other times I feel rather all over the place. I explained to a friend that sometimes I feel a bit schizophrenic, like I have a split personality. Especially when I split myself between two countries as well."

But she also feels nostalgic about life after Potter. "I'm going to miss it so much," she says. "And it suddenly feels like I've got heaps and bags and bags and bags of time."

She'll fill it studying, of course. And then some.

"I play field hockey, I like to dance, I do school plays, I play tennis, I paint. I do keep myself busy. I want to teach myself to play the mandolin. That's my next mission."

Why that particular instrument? "I wanted to start with something small because I have these tiny, tiny hands," she says, holding them out for inspection.

She is fascinated by the theater, having co-starred last year in a production of Chekhov's Three Sisters at Brown, where she will soon audition for As You Like It. Her dream is to appear on London's West End (which Radcliffe did last year, to strong reviews, in Equus).

"I appreciate I've only worked in films, so I'll need some voice training," she says. "I haven't been a stage actress. It really is a different ballgame. People kind of expect that I should be incredibly confident, but no, this is not what I'm trained in.

"If I'm in front of a camera, I'm very comfortable, but to be on a stage, you can't do a second take. You can't go back. It's frightening, but still, I like the adrenaline of knowing you get one shot. And the energy you get from a good audience, if they're really into it, is like nothing else."

Her next film project is My Week With Marilyn, in which she co-stars with Michelle Williams and Eddie Redmayne. It will be in theaters next year.

And then there's just kicking back and listening to music: "I'm a big Joni Mitchell fan," she says. "If I could listen to one album the rest of my life, it would be Blue. It makes me feel at home wherever I am in the world."

Grint is reading scripts and working happily on his golf game.

"I'm just being a bit patient and waiting for the right thing," he says. "I'm not in a real rush. This last shoot was more than a year and a half and I'm pretty exhausted, really. Now that I'm finished, there's a real sense of freedom."

Since last summer, he has been able to do the sorts of things most young people take for granted.

"I've been on a few holidays since we finished," he says. "I took one trip with James and Oliver (Phelps). We went across Europe in this rally. You have to buy a car for less than 200 pounds and try to get to Barcelona. It's just something we do. It was a real adventure. It's just been nice to have a break and do these kinds of things." The Phelps brothers play Grint's on-screen twin brothers, Fred and George Weasley.

Last year he made a low-budget Irish film called Cherry Bomb, and this year he made a film called Wild Target with Bill Nighy and Emily Blunt, which came out in the summer. Next year, he's expected to begin shooting Eddie the Eagle, in which he plays Britain's first ski jumper to enter the Winter Olympics.

People have wondered over the years if the core trio would remain in their roles. The question frequently arose: Would they age faster than their on-screen counterparts? Not only have Radcliffe, Grint and Watson been there from the beginning, but so have most of their pals, wizardly mentors and nemeses at Hogwarts. (Richard Harris, who played headmaster Albus Dumbledore in the first two films, died in 2002 and was replaced by Michael Gambon.)

Maybe it's some kind of magic, but the trio doesn't seem any the worse off for their long on-set experience and loss of a "normal" childhood. There was really nothing Hollywood about it. They were educated on the film sets outside London and sheltered by a low-key production team and crew who treated them like family. They've notably avoided trouble, scandal and many of the problems that plague some child actors.

"They've come through it," says Deathly Hallows director David Yates.

Meanwhile, the three are in the midst of one of the longest goodbyes in cinema history. They'll reunite again in July for the last film and the final farewell.

"It's been an amazing few years, I've really enjoyed it and I'm definitely going to miss it," Grint says. "But it's got to end at some point, and this is definitely a good time to turn it in. I'm kind of ready to come into my own."