NEW YORK -- Touted as a new Jude Law or Orlando Bloom (he's even an alumnus of the same theatre company as Law), Ben Barnes is starting to understand what "hot" means in Hollywood.

"There is no getting out of it now, is there?" laughs Barnes, the dark, central figure in posters for the summer blockbuster-in-waiting, The Chronicles Of Narnia: Prince Caspian.

"L.A. is a terrifying place to be at the moment -- if you're me. Just don't drive down Sunset Blvd. by mistake -- if you're me. I was caught completely short of breath, it is very surreal seeing this person that's 80% you and 20% someone 10 stories high.

"But there's no chance of me becoming flighty. Georgie (Henley, 14, who's played Lucy the youngest of the Pevensie siblings in both this movie and The Lion, The Witch & The Wardrobe) came up to me the other day and said, 'Do this!' (he adopts the pouty poster look).

"And I have my brother staying with me right now sort of mocking everything I do. So it's great. I did go to a comic convention a while back where I was face-to-face with a few people who were very excited. And there were a few nights out where there were people waiting with photographs of me to be autographed. I'm literally thinking, '(a) how did you know I was coming here? and (b) how did you know to print pictures and bring them with you?' And they were like, 'We call our friends, man, we know how this sh-- works.' "

To everything there is a season. And the seven volumes of stories that C.S. Lewis wrote under the Chronicles of Narnia rubric are marked by their tendency to drop once-central characters and introduce new ones (the stories take place as much as 1,300 years apart in Narnia time). And this is Prince Caspian's time.

He's the handsome ruler-in-exile of the sea-faring Telmarines, a people who have despoiled Narnia, turned their backs on the Christ-like lion-deity Aslan, and driven centaurs, dwarves, talking animals and other Narnians to near extinction.

While hiding from his regicidal uncle, Caspian has epiphany encounters with Narnians as well as the legendary Kings and Queens (Lucy, Susan, Edmund and Peter) who are once again plucked from their world as English schoolchildren and plopped back into the world of Lewis' imagination.

For two of them, it's a final appearance, as per the books.

More importantly, Caspian now becomes the central figure of this movie, and the next, The Voyage of the Dawn Treader. Where once it rested on four teenagers, a franchise that grossed $700 million worldwide the first time out, now rests on the shoulders of one boyish 26-year-old Englishman.

"I don't think he knows what's about to hit him," says producer Mark Johnson of Barnes. "If this movie is successful, everybody will want a piece of him, who's he going out with? Is he ready for it?"

For his part, Barnes greets such issues with glib insouciance. How does he feel about on-set romances, for example? "I support them," he says with a grin.

The producers didn't actually expect to cast a Brit in the title role. Director Andrew Adamson (Shrek) had decided that, being a pirate race, the Telmarines were Mediterranean ( "I found out later, most pirates were British," Adamson says, "Although I didn't know it at the time").

"I was doing a play in London in the West End, The History Boys," Barnes says, "and somebody from the casting department came to see the show and asked me to audition. I think I read one scene, and I got some feedback that the director liked the way I'd read one line, with a touch of irony that he hadn't heard all year. And they called me up for a screen test ... and three or four weeks later I was on a horse in New Zealand."

Which didn't turn out to be the most comfortable place to be. "I obviously spent most of the film on a horse. They did ask me in the screen test how i was on a horse, and I said something like average or good or something nondescript like that. I'd been on a horse before is what said. And I called my mom and said, 'Have I been on a horse before?' And she said, 'Yeah, I think I've got a photo.' And it was me sitting on a Shetland at age 6. You're never gonna see that photo." Thus, intense riding lessons were in order.

Stealing the limelight from four teens who'd essentially grown up together was problematic. "I learned how to deal with the younger actors from watching how William (Moseley, a.k.a. Peter) and Anna (Popplewell, who plays Susan) were with them. I watched the DVD extras when I first watched the film and they were like, 'We're like a family and Will's like a big brother and Andrew's like my dad when dad's not there,' and I was like (he puts his finger down his throat), 'Bucket, please,' this is disgusting.

"And I get there and it was exactly like that. When I first walked into the production office, they were, like, playing table tennis and climbing all over each other and sharing food. It was lovely, actually."

Hence the emotionalism at the first public screening in New York last week, when the cast first got to see the finished result, and the end of their time together.

"It was hard for William and Anna. Anna was a little emotional sitting next to me at the end. And William, when we filmed him handing over the sword (King to King), he found it difficult to let go of that, he had a pretty tight grip," Barnes says with a laugh.

Barnes' only real regret is he never got to meet Eddie Izzard, the British comedian who voices the Narnian character of Reepicheep, a warrior-mouse who joins Caspian in the war against the Telmarines.

"Eddie Izzard is one of my comedic heroes, I've seen him, like, three times onstage and obviously I didn't meet him when we were shooting. It would have been great. It was obviously exciting to see me in the movie having conversations with one of my heroes when I'd been talking to a piece of wire. He was definitely better than the wire.

"I still haven't talked to Eddie, but I just did a film called Easy Virtue, which is kind of a Noel Coward thing, and Eddie does a sketch in one of his videos about the British film industry and how nothing ever happens. People walk into a room, 'What are you doing?' 'Well, I'm just moving books to the left.' 'I didn't realize you'd be in here.' 'Well, I am.' 'Well, I think you'd better go.' 'Yes, I think you'd better had.'

"And I was doing a scene with Colin Firth in the film in which we realized we'd said nothing to each other. And we said, 'Instead of doing this scene, why don't we do (Eddie's)? We'll go in and do this little skit in the first take.' And that's what we did.

"So I'm hoping it makes the DVD extras. I'll send a copy to Eddie Izzard and hope he think's it's funny."