Almost quitting the Harry Potter franchise. The horrible 18th birthday surprise she got.
Receiving a series of threats. These are just a
few tragic details about beloved actress and activist Emma Watson.
As of 2022, Emma Watson has a reported net worth of $85 million, according to
CelebrityNetWorth.com. An estimated $70 million of that came from the Harry Potter franchise, while
the other $15 million came from the live-action Beauty and the Beast. Yet despite having enough
money to comfortably get by for a lifetime, things weren't always so cushy for Watson.
In a behind the scenes interview for the Harry Potter DVD set,
the actress revealed that there was a time when her family struggled financially while
she was growing up. Money was so tight at one point that her birthday presents
consisted of supplies for the costly school she attended. As she recounted,
"My dad really couldn't afford to send me to
this school. At the time we just didn't have the money."
Watching the effort that her father made was enough to keep
Watson focused and dedicated to her studies. As she put it,
"I worked hard every single day that I was at that school to make him proud of me,
and for him to know that I appreciated it. And I do, and I still do."
When Watson found out that she was going to be playing Hermione Granger in Harry Potter, she was
over the moon. She was only nine years old when she was cast, but she was nevertheless fiercely
independent from the start. She pretty much had to be. Her parents couldn't travel with her as she
jetted from one location to the next, as they kept their jobs. She recalled to GQ in 2013,
"As my parents were divorced and they both worked full time,
I had to grow up quickly. I guess it made me quite a serious young person."
Growing up in the spotlight and away from her family wasn't easy on Watson.
As she recalled to British Vogue in 2022,
"There's been moments when everything just got so big,
where I almost had vertigo on my own life. [...] I felt disconnected."
Furthermore, Watson isn't exactly happy with all the attention that comes with fame,
and she feels bad that she feels that way. As she explained to British Vogue,
"I've sat in therapy and felt really guilty about it, to be honest. Like,
'Why me?' Somebody else would have enjoyed and wanted this aspect of
it more than I did. And I've struggled a lot with the guilt around that. I'm like,
I should be enjoying this a lot more, I should be more excited and I'm actually really struggling."
It got so intense for Watson that she almost left acting for good.
As she put it to Vanity Fair in 2017,
"I was finding this fame thing was getting to a point of no return.
I sensed if this was something I was ever going to step away from it was now or never."
"I just needed a change."
Emma Watson spent about a decade of her life making the Harry Potter
movies. That might sound like a totally magical experience from the outside,
but she didn't always enjoy being tied down. As she once admitted,
"I felt like a prisoner of Hogwarts during the Harry Potter films, and I nearly quit at 16."
She ultimately didn't quit, of course, but she was certainly ready to move
on once the series ended. As she told Entertainment Weekly in 2010,
"I have such a structure when I'm working on Potter. I get told what time I get picked up.
I get told what time I can eat, when I have time to go to the bathroom."
Watson decided to celebrate the end of her Hogwarts era by chopping off all
her hair into an easy-to-manage pixie cut. As she explained to Marie Claire in 2010,
"It was quite symbolic for me [...] It's really liberating
that I can walk out without thinking about it."
"You have a perfect head by the way."
"Wow! I don't know if I've ever heard that before. That's so-"
"No, your skull is lovely."
"My skull!"
Watson's experience in the spotlight was significantly different than that of her two
main Harry Potter co-stars, Daniel Radcliffe and Rupert Grint, especially in terms of how
she was inappropriately sexualized. In a 2014 interview with the Associated Press,
Radcliffe brought up a conversation he had with someone who said that it was
"unconventional" that he went from Harry Potter to romantic lead. As he recalled,
"My immediate response was,
'The male population has had no problem sexualizing Emma Watson immediately.'"
And based on how Watson herself tells it, Radcliffe wasn't exaggerating.
During a conversation with Forest Whitaker during the HeForShe Arts Week in 2016, she revealed,
"I remember on my 18th birthday I came out of my birthday party and photographers laid
down on the pavement and took photographs up my skirt, which were then published on the
front of the English tabloid [newspapers] the next morning. If they had published the photographs 24
hours earlier they would have been illegal, but because I had just turned 18 they were legal."
"That's just one of- one example of how my transition into womanhood was dealt
very differently by the tabloid press."
Because of all the sexism she's endured,
Watson now uses her platform to educate people about feminism. In 2014, for example,
she launched the HeforShe initiative, which strives for gender equality across the globe.
While filming the Harry Potter series, Emma Watson formed deep bonds with her castmates, particularly
Daniel Radcliffe, Rupert Grint, and Tom Felton. As she noted to Interview Magazine in 2009,
"I love them, but I need to see other friends off set. They're like my siblings now."
Even though she grew close to her fellow Hogwarts students, there were times when
she felt like she was on an island. She opened up about this experience during the Harry Potter
20th Anniversary: Return to Hogwarts special, saying she could see at times she was lonely.
Watson's co-stars were quick to praise her for how
she handled all of the pressure that she endured. As Felton for one put it,
"People definitely forget what she took on and how gracefully
she did it. Dan and Rupert, they had each other."
You might assume that being a global superstar requires a certain level of social ease.
But as it turns out, there are many celebrities who are actually quite reserved
and don't always feel comfortable at big events. That's certainly the
case for Emma Watson. As she admitted during an interview with Wonderland,
"The truth is that I'm genuinely a shy, socially awkward, introverted person.
At a big party, I'm like Bambi in the headlights."
Thus, it must've been difficult for Watson when she was obligated to attend cast parties
and other social gatherings throughout her career. Her preference for alone time doesn't
come as much of a surprise when you consider that she's never been much of a party girl.
In a 2013 interview with Rookie, she revealed that it took her a while
to recognize that preferring to stay home is totally okay. As she put it,
"I had felt like, 'Oh my god, there must be something wrong with me,
because I don't want to go out and do what all my friends want to do.'"
But of course, there was nothing wrong with her, she just needed time to recharge.
While attending red carpet premieres for Harry Potter, Emma Watson went through something like an
out-of-body experience. She remembered standing in front of a mirror at various events only to
feel as if she was looking at a stranger. As she recalled to Vanity Fair in 2017,
"I had on so much makeup and these big, fluffy, full-on dresses. I'd put my hands
on the sink and look at myself in the mirror and say, 'who is this?' I didn't connect with
the person who was looking back at me, and that was a very unsettling feeling."
Watson also talked about grappling with being a celebrity as well as being forever linked
to a beloved fictional character. In a 2022 chat with British Vogue, she said,
"I played a symbol. I know this, because she’s a symbol for me.
I’m not [Hermione Granger]. And I’m also not what, weirdly, my name has come to mean.
Even people that are really close to me sometimes can't let it go. Or see just me.
And then sometimes I have to go, ‘No, no – I need exactly what you need. I'm just as
human as you are. I'm just as insecure as you are. I struggle just as much as you struggle."
"Ten years, you were pretty much nonstop working on those films."
"Exactly, so it's, it's nice to, nice to have a breather."
If it's not clear already, confidence issues can impact anybody,
including A-listers. That's right, even the actor who played the "beauty" in Beauty and
the Beast has struggled with her self-esteem. As Watson admitted to Esquire UK in 2016,
"I, as a 21-year-old, was riddled with insecurity and self-critiquing [...] I
realized that I didn't like friends taking photos of me when I wasn't working
and I actually got in a fight about this issue."
Watson's insecurities began at a young age. When she was a kid,
she didn't like her eyebrows, which might sound shocking considering just how iconic
they look now. Ultimately, though, Watson eventually had something of an epiphany
and stopped picking herself apart every time she wasn't in full glam. As she put it,
"Ironically, it's probably made me more beautiful and more confident
as a result because I'm not carrying that anxiety anymore. I don't think
it's weird any more that I don't look like myself on the cover of a magazine."
Emma Watson now knows that it's perfectly fine to be single at any age, but that doesn't mean
that she didn't have to deal with a lot of stress over her relationship status, or lack thereof,
when she turned 30. Even though she'd already achieved so much in her life by that milestone,
a fear of inadequacy still loomed large. As she admitted to British Vogue in 2019,
"If you have not built a home, if you do not have a husband, if you do not have a baby,
and you are turning 30, and you're not in some incredibly secure, stable place in your career,
or you're still figuring things out...There's just this incredible amount of anxiety."
But rather than allow those societal expectations to bring her down,
Watson embraced where she was at in her life. As she explained,
"It took me a long time, but I'm very happy [being single]. I call it being self-partnered."
"I'm so happy people feel empowered by my stressful moment. It's great!"
Although Watson made peace with being on her own, her relationship
status has reportedly since changed. As People Magazine noted in November 2020,
she's been linked to a businessman named Leo Robinton. Rumblings of a love connection began
in April of that year, although they were actually first spotted out and about back in October 2019.
Emma Watson has been able to use her platform to get her feminist message out to millions,
but she's also experienced a ton of hateful blowback. But just like her most famous character,
she has enough brains to know that this was bound to happen.
Nevertheless, that didn't exactly make it any easier to get through.
In 2014, Watson delivered her HeforShe speech, in which she addressed issues regarding gender
inequality. Two years later, she then talked about the intense response she received
following that speech. As she revealed to a crowd at the 2016 One Young World summit,
"My best hopes and my worst fears were confirmed all at once. I had opened Pandora's Box to a
standing ovation and almost simultaneously a level of critique I had never experienced in my life,
and the beginning of what would become a series of threats."
No matter how bad it got, though, Watson never wanted to quit her activism work.
As she put it during a Q&A at Facebook headquarters in London in 2017,
"If anything, it made me so much more determined. I was just raging. It
made me so angry that I was just like, 'This is why I have to be doing this!'"
If you or someone you know is struggling with mental health, please contact
the Crisis Text Line by texting HOME to 741741, call the National Alliance on Mental Illness
helpline at 1-800-950-NAMI (6264), or visit the National Institute of Mental Health website.