The Curious Hollywood Retreat of ‘Harry Potter’ Star Emma Watson

Barely a week goes by, it seems, without further fallout over the strident stance adopted by the billionaire “Harry Potter” author, J.K. Rowling, over the issue of transgender rights. Most recently, the editor of the New Yorker magazine, David Remnick, took issue with “the ferocity and even, I have to say, cruelty” of Ms. Rowling’s conventional beliefs on gender identity in a podcast with John Lithgow, the actor currently performing as Roald Dahl on Broadway in ‘Giant,’ who is also playing wizard headmaster Dumbledore in the upcoming “Harry Potter” series on HBO. Mr. Lithgow also hit out at Rowling’s “imputed prejudice,” although he added that would not stop him from appearing in HBO’s “Harry Potter” series.The battleground is significant. One can say with a reasonable degree of certainty that if Ms. Rowling were to write the “Harry Potter” series today, as opposed to 1997 when the first of her iconic seven fantasy novels hit the shelves, she would face difficulty even getting published, given her bold refusal to align to liberal orthodoxy on transgenderism.Yet to my mind a bitterly-fought culture war over gender identity isn’t the most interesting “Harry Potter”-related story of our time. That would instead be the strange fate of Emma Watson, the 35-year-old English actress who played Hermione Granger in the film series.Ms. Watson’s estimated worth is reputed to be $85 million, thanks to “Harry Potter” and assorted fashion contracts. Ms. Watson was reportedly paid $30 million to appear in the final two “Harry Potter” films, following protracted negotiations over her willingness to continue appearing in the franchise. This earned her the accolade of being Vanity Fair’s highest paid female actress in 2010 at the tender age of 19.Yet whether Emma Watson can still be classified an actress is a moot point. She has not appeared in a film since she was seen in Greta Gerwig’s adaptation of “Little Women” in 2019. It should be stressed this is by choice. While J.K. Rowling may be in need of no reminder that we’re in the era of Hollywood cancel culture, Ms. Watson has, in effect, cancelled herself from film stardom.“There is always one moment in childhood when the door opens and lets the future in,” Graham Greene wrote in his 1940 masterpiece “The Power and the Glory.” For Ms. Watson that opening was being cast as Hermione in “Harry Potter”; but in her subsequent efforts to be a modern polymath she seems to be trying to prise too many doors open.Ms Watson has become a serial student. Having graduated from Brown University in 2014, she is presently a postgraduate student studying creative writing at New College, Oxford, not her first stint at the elite English university. As well as being educated out of her wits, Ms. Watson has been a model, written poetry during lockdown, admitted to penning a play for her friends to explain her public persona, and launched Renais Gin, a spirits company with her brother Alex Watson.Emma Watson pictured at a New York event in 2023. Arturo Holmes/Getty ImagesWith her refined acting style, elegant beauty, and evident business savvy, Ms. Watson, on the surface, possessed all the key attributes to conquer Hollywood. Indeed after the “Harry Potter” series ended, she enjoyed greater movie success than her Hogwarts co-stars Daniel Radcliffe and Rupert Grint, most notably as Belle in Disney’s 2017 “Beauty and the Beast” remake, which grossed over $1.2 billion globally, and heading the cast of Sofia Coppola’s 2015 indie celebrity satire “The Bling Ring.” “Emma reminds me of stars like Audrey Hepburn and Grace Kelly,” Christopher Kane, the celebrated fashion designer, told Elle magazine in 2009.Yet, literally, Ms. Watson no longer acts like it. She has long harbored doubts over whether she wanted to continue a film career — in 2016 she said she was taking a year off from acting to focus on promoting feminism. But the sabbatical now seems more permanent. Her reservations seemingly stem from issues with every aspect of the film process. While Mr. Radcliffe was determined to branch out from “Harry Potter,” playing a series of eclectic roles in low-budget films, Ms. Watson found walking away from the series more challenging. “Hermione is so close to who I am as a person that I’ve never really had to research a role,” she told Vogue magazine in 2011.Not being able to replicate the experience she had on “Harry Potter” is a crucial stumbling block. “I was coming to those sets with an expectation that I had developed on ‘Harry Potter,’ which was that the people I worked with were going to be my family, and that we were going to be lifelong friends,” she told the podcaster Jay Shetty last year. “I came to work looking for friendship. And that was a very painful experience for me, outside of ‘Harry Potter,’ and in Hollywood, bone-breakingly painful, because most people don’t come to those environments looking for friendships.”Added to the lack of alliances formed during a film’s production, the selling of a movie seems to give her a fresh set of anxieties. Like her late compatriot, the singer George Michael, she seems to have chronic issues with the demands of fame and publicity that form part of the package of modern celebrity. “Even though you’re wearing an incredibly glamorous dress and you’re there to do something exciting, I don’t think there’s anything that can make it not weird that people are screaming at the top of their lungs,” she told Jay Shetty about gracing red carpets at premieres. “Everything in your body says something’s wrong.”A Hollywood producer, speaking on condition of anonymity, said it was concerns over onerous publicity duties that led Ms. Watson to ultimately not go ahead with starring in a blockbuster franchise, “Queen of the Tearling” series, a futuristic fantasy saga based on the novels by Erika Johansen and dubbed the female equivalent of “Game of Thrones,” which would have re-united her with “Harry Potter” producer David Heyman. “Evidently the sensitivities that made her so good in ‘Harry Potter’ are now impeding her acting horizons,” the producer added. “But it’s odd; Nicole Kidman and Daniel Day-Lewis have shown you don’t have to do all that much publicity and still act. I’m not sure she’s worked out that she doesn’t have to make herself so readily available.”Emma Watson and Macaulay Culkin at the W magazine and Dior pre-Oscars dinner in California last month. Emma McIntyre/Getty Images for W magazineMs. Watson may have public issues with fame but she does not shun social occasions. Last month alone she was pictured attending Beyoncé’s Oscars party, posing with Macaulay Culkin at a W Magazine and Christian Dior pre-Oscars dinner, and attending a Paul McCartney concert, all in Los Angeles. Her restlessness extends to her personal life. While her “Harry Potter” co-stars, Messrs Radcliffe and Grint have both settled down and are fathers, Ms. Watson has had a series of boyfriends, most recently billionaire Mexican AI entrepreneur Gonzalo Hevia Baillères.Acting might have been put to one side but Ms Watson continues to be a political activist, having served as a UN Women Goodwill Ambassador for over a decade, launched HeForShe, a campaign that urges men to support equality for women, and been a founding member of Time’s Up UK, the organization set up in the wake of the #MeToo movement to fight sexual harassment in the workplace.Yet her political campaigning has proved divisive. In 2019 she was subject to widespread ridicule for the way she described her single status, telling Vogue, “I call it being self-partnered.” Three years later she posted on Instagram a picture of a pro-Palestinian protest with the banner, “Solidarity is a Verb.” Danny Danon, Israel’s former and current ambassador to the United Nations, witheringly shared Watson’s post on social media, referencing one of the Hogwarts houses in “Harry Potter”: “10 points from Gryffindor for being an antisemite.”Emma Watson and JK Rowling pictured in 2011. Chris Jackson/Getty ImagesPerhaps most painfully for Ms. Watson, she has enudred a very public fall-out with Ms. Rowling. The pair retained a close relationship long after the “Harry Potter” franchise ended, attending each other’s parties and interviewing one another for luxury magazines. But their relationship became strained after Ms. Rowling became vocal on transgenderism. At the 2020 BAFTA Film Awards, Ms. Watson responded to being introduced by actress Rebel Wilson with the words, “She calls herself a feminist, but we all know she’s a witch,” with the retort, “I’m here for all the witches.” This was widely taken as a show of support for the transgender community. Ms. Rowling hit back on X: “Like other people who’ve never experienced adult life uncushioned by wealth and fame, Emma has so little experience of real life she’s ignorant of how ignorant she is.”However, Ms. Watson may not yet be done with film. In 2023 she formed two film companies, Sofia Rising and Breadcrumb Productions. Sources told the Sun Ms. Watson’s is ultimately intent on directing movies — she directed a short film for Prada in 2022. Yet Emily Hargrove, her personal assistant on the “Harry Potter” films who had been working with Ms. Watson on her creative pursuits, has now resigned as a director from her companies, and doubts remain whether her widely-expressed ongoing unease with filmmaking will ever result in her going behind the camera.Emma Watson attends the Prada Spring/Summer 2024 Womenswear Fashion Show in 2023 in Milan, Italy. Vittorio Zunino Celotto/Getty Images for Prada“As I’ve become more healed and whole and more comfortable being myself, it’s been interesting to ask myself, do you still need acting?” she said on Jay Shetty’s podcast. “Do you still need to act? Like, why? What are you doing that for?” Time will tell whether Emma Watson is still willing and able to successfully answer her own questions.

The Curious Hollywood Retreat of ‘Harry Potter’ Star Emma Watson

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