WILLIAM Moseley's life is about to rocket into the stratosphere. Having finished filming a while back, the 18-year-old is on the cusp of the sort of fame that only rounds of publicity for huge blockbuster movies can bring.

Luckily, the former Wycliffe College pupil is an articulate, engaging and enthusiastic young man, and appears to be very grounded, thanks to a tight family unit and good friends.

"My friends were there from the start of the auditioning, through the whole 18 months, so they, like my family, have experienced the whole thing with me," he said.

"I missed my friends and I missed the social life while filming because all the people were older than me or younger than me, but because I just got on with there was never really time to miss home.

"When you're doing the publicity it never really hits home because you're just doing it.

"But when you step out of that goldfish bowl and look back in it's like oh my, don't look down, It's so intense.

"It's very difficult balancing school with all the rounds of publicity.

"It's hard because you have to get your priorities right.

"I'm very bad at organisation and I have to make sure my time is totally organised and everything's laid out so that I can just get on with the work and do it then."

He had done little acting before landing a role as an extra in Cider with Rosie, and had only played small parts in things like a TV movie of Goodbye Mr Chips before The Chronicles of Narnia hoved into view.

I asked him how it felt to have gone from small parts to playing a main character in a blockbuster.

"Crazy!" he said emphatically.

"I thought it would be a feature film, but I never realised the scale of it, I never had any idea, I don't think any of us did and I think they wanted to keep it like that, they didn't want to hype it up.

"They just wanted to get as many kids as possible and chuck them all in and see how it worked out. It's totally astonishing, it really is."

He also found making the film in New Zealand a remarkable experience. "It's an unbelievable place," he said. "It was really life-changing."

'A bit like stepping through a wardrobe into another world?' I asked him.

"It has been like that since I first got the part, I can tell you. Not just in New Zealand."

Despite the potentially soul-destroying rounds of publicity, he is still very enthusiastic about acting, even finding time to praise the process of filming against a blue screen which allows the computer generated characters to be added.

William plans to keep acting if possible. "If you love something, why stop doing it?" he said.

"I'm reading lots of scripts and obviously there's the next film coming up, which might happen as well. I'm just waiting to see what grabs me."

Thanks to William's enthusiasm, energy and charming disposition, one would hope something grabs him soon.

Given that the film is almost guaranteed to be a huge hit, based, as it is, on a series of beloved books and directed by the very sure-handed of Shrek director Andrew Adamson, it's hard to see it not happening.

*The Chronicles of Narnia: The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe opens nationwide on December 9