Ahead of the premiere of HBO Max’s Harry Potter 20th Anniversary: Return to Hogwarts special, Emma Watson reveals in a preview clip that she almost walked away from the films due to the mounting pressures of fame.
During the reunion episode, David Yates (who directed the film Harry Potter and the Order of the Phoenix) recalled how she almost retired from the franchise. “People definitely forget what she took on and how gracefully she did it,” said her former co-star Tom Felton of her meteoric rise to fame. He added that while he had his own friends to help and Rupert Grint and Daniel Radcliffe had people to lean on, he says Watson was on her own for the most part.
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“We never talked about it on the film because we were all just kids,” Radcliffe said. “As a 14-year-old boy, I was never going to turn around to another 14-year-old and be like, ‘Hey, how are you doing? Is everything okay?’”
Watson remembered feeling lonely at points during that time of her young career. “I think I was scared,” Watson told Grint. “I don’t know if you ever felt like it got to a tipping point where you were like, ‘This is kind of forever now.’”
Grint chimed in, sharing that he had similar experiences. “I had moments like that kind of all the way through,” he told Watson. “I also had similar feelings to Emma kind of contemplating what life would be like if I called it a day, but we never really spoke about it. I guess we were just kind of going through it at our own pace. We were kind of in the moment at the time. It just didn’t really occur to us that we were all having similar feelings.”
“The fame thing had finally hit home in a big way,” Watson added. This isn’t the first time those within the Harry Potter universe talked about Watson’s wanting to leave. Producer David Heyman shared with The Hollywood Reporter in 2013 that she contemplated saying goodbye at another point to focus on her studies. Watson began studying at Brown University in 2009. She graduated with a degree in English Literature in 2014.
“Emma [Watson], in particular, was quite academic and was very keen in [the] pursuit of schooling and was wrestling a little bit more than the others,” Heyman told the outlet then. “So each time there was a negotiation, it was not about a financial [matter], it really was about, ‘Do I want to be a part of this?’ We had to be sensitive to her needs and how important school was to her. And you have to listen. In our position, you’re not dictating, you’re listening. At the same time, it’s a tipping point, and it’s working within a framework. I deeply respected her, encouraged her. She’s very smart, always was, and fiercely intelligent.’”
