Feminist icon.
Role model.
Muggle-born witch.
Is there anything Hermione Granger can't do?
For years, she’s captivated, inspired, and sparked controversy on page and on screen.
So let's fly off into the wilds on our Quidditch brooms in search of the untold truth about
this Harry Potter heroine.
A grueling life
According to a 2010 interview published in Entertainment Weekly, Harry Potter star Emma
Watson found the grueling filming schedule for the films absolutely "horrible."
In fact, her decision to ultimately renew her contract for five more years was, in her
words, "agonizing."
She said:
"I love to make people laugh and I love being creative, but there are so many other things
I love doing too."
Of her rigorously-structured life on set, she explained:
"I get told what time I can eat, when I have time to go to the bathroom.
Every single second of my day is not in my power."
Living up to the legend
Playing the role of a ghoulishly clever witch for the better part of your young life would
be enough to give anybody an inferiority complex.
“Wingardium leviosa."
Speaking to Porter magazine in 2015, Emma Watson suggested that all the time and effort
spent bringing Hermione Granger to life made her feel out of step with her non-actor peers.
She told the magazine that:
"[I've] spent more than half of my life pretending to be someone else.
While my contemporaries were dyeing their hair and figuring out who they were, I was
figuring out who Hermione was and how best to portray her."
That interview took place four years after Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows: Part
2 was released in theaters.
With the project wrapped, Watson finally had room to breathe.
She said:
"Now at 25 for the first time in my life I feel like I have a sense of self that I'm
comfortable with.
I actually do have things that I want to say and I want to be my most authentic self."
Frenetic phonetics
In 2018, a fervid Harry Potter fan tweeted at J.K.
Rowling and casually ran a pet theory past the author.
Even if the theory isn't quite as elaborate as some of the others we've heard — it does
have the distinction of having been confirmed as true by Rowling herself.
In Harry Potter and the Goblet of Fire, the fourth book in the Harry Potter series, readers
are introduced to Viktor Krum, a Bulgarian wizard who continually butchers the pronunciation
of Hermione's name.
He keeps saying "Her-my-own," whereas any wizard worth his or her salt knows the name
is phonetically pronounced "Her-my-o-knee."
“Ruddy pumpkin-head, isn’t he?”
“I don’t think it was the books that had him going to the library.”
The Twitter user suggested that Rowling "included that passage on how to pronounce Hermione's
name in Goblet of Fire just to school all of us who were saying HER-MY-OWN like Viktor
Krum."
Rowling responded with a terse, two-word tweet:
"Theory correct."
The regret
We all make mistakes.
Sometimes we forget things, sometimes we lose our temper, and sometimes — well, sometimes
this happens.
Always one to own up to her follies, J.K.
Rowling admits she made one crucial mistake while plotting out the final novel in the
Harry Potter series — and it's a doozy.
In hindsight, she strongly believes Hermione Granger should have wound up romantically
entwined with the story’s eponymous hero, and not longtime admirer and friend Ron Weasley.
She explained to Wonderland magazine that:
"I wrote the Hermione/Ron relationship as a form of wish fulfillment.
That's how it was conceived, really."
Having made this revelation, Rowling wondered aloud:
"Am I breaking people's hearts by saying this?
I hope not."
Having it all
Career, romance and family: Is the concept of "having it all" merely the stuff of fairy
tales?
While keeping fans up to date on Hermione's recent exploits, a 2014 update to Rowling's
Pottermore website — written in character as gossip columnist Rita Skeeter — touched
upon the issue.
It explained:
"After a meteoric rise to Deputy Head of the Department of Magical Law Enforcement, [Granger]
is now tipped to go even higher within the Ministry, and is also mother to son, Hugo,
and daughter, Rose.
Does Hermione Granger prove that a witch really can have it all?
(No — look at her hair.)"
Following its publication, Time writer Lily Rothman added her two cents, suggesting that:
"Hermione — who Rowling says is an 'exaggeration' of herself — shows how difficult it is to
live up to external ideas of what's expected of a woman."