Once upon a time there were two little brown-haired girls living in England. Both were kind, full of energy, and eager to please, and had a charming habit of telling people what to do. One was named Hermione Granger, the other Emma Watson. Both races to be the first to raise their hands in class and they always had the right answer. At age 11, Hermione was so bright and winning that she was selected to go to Hogwarts, the famous school for magic in J. K. rowling’s ‘Harry Potter’ series. Emma, on the other hand, was just one of the millions of young girls who loved the ‘Harry Potter’ books.
“If I’m honest, I was her,” says Watson of Hermione. “I was very keen. I was super eagar to please and be good. That was me written all over. And I was always kind of bossy.” Now completing her freshman year at Brown, Watson is a petite, emphatic bundle of energy wearing cute, vaguely hipster sneakers, slim jeans and a sloppy ponytail. We’re ensconced in a suite at a Providence, Rhode Island hotel because Watson feats nothing would be more embarassing than a classmate spotting her with a reporter.
At age nine, Emma was so bright and winning that she was chosen to play Hermione in the first ‘Harry Potter’ movie, ‘Harry Potter and the Philosopher’s Stone’. Like Hermione going to Hogwarts, she entered a world that was crazy and fantastic and sometimes scary. It got too scary, actually. Playing Hermione became such a big deal that Emma started losing sight of Emma. She cried and cried and wanted to leave. But then she did what Hermione would do; mustered all the courage and energy and brainpower a little girl possibly could and stuck it out. What she found was even stranger than anything Rowling could have dreamed up.
Hermione’s parents are both dentists. Watson’s are both Oxford-educated lawayers. When Watson was five, her parents, Christ and Jackie, got divorced. Emma and her younger brother, Alex, lived with their motherin Oxford, their father lived in London. For a girl who never wants to let anyone down, having to divide her time between her parents was difficult and sometimes painful. One of her favourite moments of her time with Dad was his reading ‘Harry Potter’ to her and her brother at bedrime, with Dad doing all the voices. The cliff-hangers at the end of each chapter were too much to bear. Like millions of kids around the world, Emma and her brother would please, “Please, just one more chapter!”
Emma couldn’t get enough of the bushy-haired Hermione - how she was always first to identify a magic potion, the way she always knew what “the instructions explicitly say”, the way she always tried to keep Harry and Ron fro acting like total fools, reprimanding them with clever lines such as, “I hope you’re pleased with yourself. We all could have been killed - or, worse, expelled!”
And so it was the most thrilling thing ever to happen when word spread at her prepatory school, the Dragon School, in Oxford that everyone’s favourite book was being turned into a movie and that, like the prince’s henchmen searching for Cinderella, the casting agents were meeting tens of thousands of little girls at different schools throughout the land, among them Watson’s own! “From the moment I heard it, it had to be mine,” she says.
At the Dragon, a rather famous school with many prominent alums, the drama teacher put up about 14 gor;s for the audition, includig Watson, who’d shown a flair for performance, having won a poetry competition at the age of six. That first audition took place in the assembly room, and the casting agents asked the kids to do simple drama exercises, such as stepping into an imaginary box and becoming a cat or a robot. Watson was called back three weeks later to do another audition, this time with the casting director simply asking her questions about herself on-camera. She was called back another three times, now doing readings with various Harrys and Rons.
With Watson’s excitement growing fairly uncontainable her parents worked hard to manage expectations. “I knew these kinds of little girls’ dreams just don’t happen,” says her father Chris Watson. “I said, ‘It will be a great adventure. Have a lovely time but don’t think you’re going to get the part, because life doesn’t work like that.’ I was pretty brutal.”
In fact, Watson was a standout from the start. When producer David Heyman and director Chris Columbus first saw her screen test, “Emma just came alive on-screen,” says Columbus. “Then we met her. She was energetic and unbelievably bright. It was like she was channeling Hermione.” Their only concern was that she was too pretty, as Rowling had written Hermione to have big buckteeth and an overbite. This being Hollywood, they could live with.
emma came with two parents who were decoted and serious people, proud of their daughter, but soberly detached from the sensational world she would be entering. “I had learned some very harsh lessons, particularly doing the ‘Home Alone’ pictures,” says Columbus, “that not only do you cast the kids but you cast the families as well. We made absolutely certain that these kids came from really strong families.”
It took some time for Watson to realise that she’d been offered the part. She was staying with her father in London when he called her into the kitchen. They’d been sent a contract, he told her, saying that she was the “preferred candidate” for the of Hermione which Emma took to mean they were still undecided. A few days later, she was invited to the Leavesden Film Studios, in West Hertfordshire. “I assumed it was going to be another audition,” se says. Instead, she and Grint were invited into Heyman’s office and told that they had the roles. They were promptly taken downstairs to meet Radcliffe, the boy who would be Harry. Before she knew it, without a moment to process the excitement, the new Harry, Ron and Hermione were standing in front of a line of flashing cameras. As those pictures hit the Internet five minutes later, the kids were thrown into their first press conference, all three propped up on cushions so they could reach the mikes. Dozens of Rita Skeeters fired questions about how it felt to be the chosen ones.
“Rupert was so chatty,” Watson recalls, “while Dan and I were so nervous we could hardly string a sentence together.” During a break, they lay on the floor and played some Monopoly. Then they were told to go to a hotel that had been booked for them, and not to go home - photographers would be waiting outside their houses.
There was never any talk among the members of the Watson family about what being a child actress really meant. That Emma would get the part had seems “so fanciful,” says her father. Now it was too late: Emma had the part. She and the boys hit the ground running. (It didn’t hurt that Emma would be paid a reported $5 million for the first six movies. She would go on to become the highest-paid actress in Hollywood in 2009.)
the kids spent much of the first few months shooting traveling through England, from Newcastle to Durham to Harrow, so Columbus could capture all the historical sites that would form Hogwarts. Because both of her parents worked, Watson had no family emmebers accompanying her, just a chaperon provided by Warner Bros. and dozens of Beanie Babies that housekeeping would tidily line up against her pillow every day. they may not have had their parents with them, but the kids did have some of Britain’s most illustrious actors - including Richard Harris, Maggie Smith, Alan Rickaman, Julie Walters, Miranda Richardson and Fiona Shaw.
“They seemed like tiny little children lost in this huge great set. With hundreds of people around and machinery and so on,” recalls Robbie Coltrade, who plays the hairy, lovable behemoth Hagrid, the friend of Harry, Hermione and Ron in the books. But the ‘Harry Potter’ crew became a surrogate family. Most of the crew members were parents in real life, which created a gentle, sympathetic environment. Director Columbus, having spent most of his career gently shepherding children in front of the camera for such films as the ‘Home Alone’ movies and ‘Mrs. Doubtfire’, made it safe to make mistakes. Coltrane, like his character, became the big, fun, special friend, routinely shocking and amusing the kids with his off-colour jokes. “Emma rather likes rude jokes,” he says. Meanwhile, Watson and the boys - just like Rowling’s famous trio - became like siblings by virtue of this surreal experience they were sharing. “The attention those kids got was staggering,” says Columbus. “They were coming from a place of near obscurity, and to be thrown into instant, instantaneous fame is daunting. They bonded emotionally over that.”
But getting through the first movie wasn’t easy. Each day, per requirements of the law, the kids worked with an academic tutor for at least three hours before shooting could begin - and then they’d have only four hours to work. “Every day was sort of like acting class,” says Columbus, recalling that the kids could ofen deliver only one line before they’d be looking in the camera or laughing. “But Emma was always very well prepared in terms of learning her lines, and her instincts as an actress were very obvious from the beginning.” there were a few horrific notions that Watson had to process. when she was shown the dorky clothes that Hermione would have to wear, she panicked. “I was pretty devastated by the concept that my first on-screen moment I was going to look really geeky,” she says. And having to run down the hallway in the Hogwarts dining hall and fling her arms around Harry was simply petrifying. “You cannot imagine as a nine-year-old girl how embarrassing it is even just to hug a boy. You just don’t do that.”
But in both instances Watson rose to the occasion. She gamely agreed to wear false bucktetth until Columbus realised that they gave her a lisp. (Not to ‘Harry Potter’ fanatics: you can spot them in the good-bye scene at the train station, the first scene that was actually shot.) As for the whole hug thing, her panic gave the scene poignancy. “Her first response after she did it was so honest and shocking to me as a director,” says Columbus. “Because of that dear, because of that nervousness, her performance was so honest and real. She was just incredibly naturel.” Like Hermione, toiling away over bubbling potions until her face was practically melting, Watson, even at nine, was determined to excel at her new craft.
There was something rare about Watson - it was plain to see. “She was the deeply intelligent one, right from the start,” says Coltrane. “she ws never one for small talk. One thing that always impressed me was that she never talked about herself. Wee girls, at that age, all want to talk about wee girls and pretty much nothing else. She always made an effort to talk about things that she thought might interest you. It’s very mature … I remember her talking about ideas.” Helena Bonham Carter, who plays the maniacal Bellatrix Lestrange, says, “She’s a funny mix of very bright and really healthy modesty. Modesty bordering on self-critical … She’s very analytical as a person, which is very suited to Hermione.”
‘Harry Potter and the Philosopher’s Stone’ was a hit, earning $90 million worldwide its first weekend. With the success of the first film, there would, naturally, be more to come - eight by 2011, one of the longest sets of movie sequels in history.
Over the course of the first thee films, the acting ability of all thee kids transformed dramatically. ‘Prisoner of Azkaban’, directed by Alfonso Cuaron (Y Tu Mama Tambien), “they’d become such terrific actors that they could get through an entire scene in one take,” says Columbus, who by then was the producer. Hermione was gaining confidence, marching up to her icy and malevolent classmate Draco Malfoy and declaring, “You foul, loathsome, evil little cockroach,” coldcoking him and then coolly remarking, “That felt good.”
Meanwhile, her relationships with her co-stars were evolving, each becoming distinct and special. “I’d go to Rupert when I needed cheering up,” Watson says, recalling a dressing room always filled with games like table tennis, pool and darts, remote-controlled gadgets and candy. “He’s just fun.” (Unlike Hermione, who had a crush on Ron, Emma never had a crush on Rupert, and instead fell for Tom Felton, who plays Malfoy, and would eagerly check her call sheet every morning to see if they had scenes together. But, hey, this was real life. What teenage girls doesn’t like the blonde bad boy than the goofy redhead?)
Radcliffe would become an intellectual sparring partner on the subjects of music, film, politics - anything. “Some of the most interesting conversations I’ve had have been with him. Dan is incredibly articulare … but he doesn’t budge, so it drives me crazy.” They fight constantly over what’s playing on the CD player. “I’ll be stumbling into the trailer in the morning, and he’lls be playing something very loud and abrasive.” Like Harry and Hermione, Radcliffe became Watson’s chief confidant. “At the end of the day, when something goes badly, he’s the one I turn to and talk it over with,” says Watson. As time went on, she turned to him more and more as it seemed Harry Potter was taking over their lives.
Retaining as much as she could of a normal A student’s life was critical to Watson. Juggling work and school was somewhat doable at the beginning. By age 15 she felt she was slipping from where she should have been in her secondary school, the Headington School for Girls, in Oxford. It wasn’t like Hermione to fall behind, and it wasn’t like Emma. by the time she contemplating the sixth form, with her A-levels getting closer, she felt even more painfully conflicted. “I’m juggling two parents, juggling between two different lives - I just felt like I have been ripped in a million pieces. I had a bit of a freak-out,” says Watson. “But then I took a deep beath. I was like, I can, I will make it work. I’m not prepared to give up either thing, so I’m just going to work my ass off and do them both.” You can almost hear Hermione say these very words - without the “ass part”. As it turned out, she got the highest score possible on all three A-levels.
With scores like those - not to mention having starred in a $5.4 billion grossing movie series - getting into the best British university would be a breeze. And indeed, she got into Cambridge. But the game plan was detrailed after an American friend showed her his course book for college. “I was like: ‘All undergraduates are allowed to take all of these different courses? You don’t have to apply for one thing?’ It was an epiphany.” Mustering her courage she told her parents that she wanted to go to college in the States. “I kind of freaked my parents out. Everybody looked at me like, ‘Are you nuts?’”
It was early September, move-in day for Brown freshmen and as Watson settled into her dorm she realised she had just made the biggest mistake of her life. Where were the people with clipboards telling her where she needed to be? where was the trolley following behind her with all her favourite biscuits? Where were Dan and Rupert and Robbie and all the rest? How stupid she had been to want to go to college in the U.S. if it meant this: complete and utter loneliness, feeling like a total loser.
“It was just awful,” she recalls thinking at first, during freshman week. “I was like, I must be mad. Why am I doing this?” And what was with all the party-hearty stuff? She nervously attended her first frat party, hoping she might get into the swing of things. “I felt like I’d walked into an American teen movie. I picked up the red cups. I was like, Wow, they really do drink from these.” Thens she started meeting people. First she got to know her roommate, a major athelete who wouldn’t know Snape and Dumbledore from Beavis and Butt-Head. That was a relief. Then she happened upon Richard from downstairs, a “rowing guy”, who approached her one day on her way out of the dorm and told her that she was the perfect size to be a coxswain and that she should come down to the crew hous and try it out. She intially declined, but each morning there was Richard again, prodding her. His enthusiasm was endearing. so she decided, for a time, to give it a go. There was so much more to discover - an infinite number of possibilities, it seemed. After “shopping” classes, she settled on European women’s history, Ovid’s ‘Metamorphoses’ and acting. “I think actually I’m the worst person in the class,” says Watson, cheerily relaying the mortifying fact that he acting teacher, Thom Jones, told her she didn’t breathe properly. “He said, ‘I’m surprised you’re actually able to function in your daily life, the amount of oxygen you take in is so small.’ I was like, Oh God, that’s terrible.”
But terrible in a good way. This consumate striver, quietly fretting her whole life about letting others down, has finally found out what it feels like to be a normal, liberated girl, struggling with insecurtiies like everyone else and taking pride in small triumph that have nothing to do with hit movies. “I was scared before I cam to Brown - that I wasn’t going to be allowed to have both [a career and a normal life]. People would thinkg that I didn’t deserve to have both: You’re famous. You’re given free handbags. Why should you deserve to be normal?”
I ask how she’d feel if she were ultimately to become ‘normal’ normal, like teacher/lawyer/librian normal, not just movie-star normal (i.e., not just Julia Roberts). “I think I could imagine it, but I almost wonder whether peope would think I failed if I did that,” she says after some thought, and then she acknowledges that there’s a part of fame that is, well, addictive.
“You get these massive highs,” she says. “It’s like you sort of have a stage of hundreds of hundreds of people at a movie premiere, and it’s lights going off everywhere, and you don’t have a second to think, and you have a million people doing everything for you because you’re so busy trying to do whatever. And you go from this hyper-intenseness, and then you’ll finish your movie, and it’ll just stop. Or you’ll go to your hotel room and there will just be silence. And I can’t explain it, but it freaks you out.”
She’s also beginning to discover her glamorous side. Robbie Coltrane recalls seeing her recently in this new light. “I was driving through London, in Mayfair, and there’s the Burberry window and a huge picture of Emma looking incredibly glamorour in these coats and with the slight sneer that all the posh models have. The driver and I, who’d both been working on the films, said, ‘Christ, there’s our Em!’” According to Burberry creative director Christopher Bailey, who cast her in the campaign, “She’s the only girl I know who gets two completely different reactions from people: ‘Aw!’ and ‘Whoa!’”
But at Brown, Emma has figured out how to keep her celebrity from getting in the way. Last fall, Richard and the crew guys sat her down and told her that a ‘Harry Potter’ party would be taking place. “We just want you to know that it’s got nothing to do with you,” one of them explained. “Because we’re the ones who organise the party. It’s been here for ages and we really hope you don’t mind.”
“They were really sweet about it. It was so cute,” says Watson, visibly touched. All the same, she spent the evening with friends at a Lebanese restaurant.
Transcribed by Kaetlyn, based on the original “Vanity Fair” magazine scans
Tuesday, May 11, 2010
Saturday, November 28, 2009
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