An Underrated Emma Watson Movie Is Leaving Netflix in January
While Emma Watson is best known for playing Hermione Granger in the Harry Potter series, she has some other noteworthy acting credits under her belt as well. After HBO Max's recent special, Harry Potter 20th Anniversary: Return to Hogwarts, many fans are digging into the cast's more obscure offerings, including Watson's. One of the most prestigious and underrated films she acted in was Sofia Coppola's The Bling Ring, which was a fictional account of real events surrounding a series of robberies in Los Angeles in the 2000s. If you missed the 2013 drama, be sure to catch it before it leaves Netflix on Jan. 17.
Watson stars as Nicki, a fame-obsessed teenager to leads a group who used the Internet to find the whereabouts of celebrities like Lindsay Lohan and Paris Hilton and rob them while they're out of town. The film was a sharp satire of Hollywood excess and the lengths that people will go to in order to attain it.
With her Valley Girl accent and entitled air, The Bling Ring is considered one of Watson's best performances. "The character [of Nicki] is everything that I felt strongly against – she's superficial, materialistic, vain and amoral," Watson told GQ in 2013. "She's all of these things and I realized I hated her. How do you play someone you hate? But I found it really interesting and it gave me a whole new insight into what my job or my role as an actress could be."
Alexis Haines (née Neiers), the real-life girl who inspired Watson's character, spoke out against the Harry Potter actress's comments. Haines was sentenced to 180 days in county jail, three years' probation, and a fine of $600,000. However, she was released from jail after one month. "The problem I had is with the comments [Watson] made about me and the role despite the fact that she already knew that I was a convicted…like the heroin part, the drug addiction part had already come out. So I was actually in treatment at the time they were filming the movie," Haines said while she was a guest on comedian Ziwe Fumudow's Instagram Live show in 2020.
"I think [Watson] said something along the lines of like 'this girl's the epitome of what I'm totally against and she's disgusting,' and you know at that point I already came out with the fact that I've been sexually abused throughout my childhood and was like a full-blown heroin addict at the time."