Who knows what will happen to the British film industry when Potter finally
packs up its coffers. We can, however, make an educated guess that Watson
will come back to the screen after university. She has already been offered
lots of roles, but mostly of the trashy Shopaholic-genre. “It is
stuff that doesn’t make you think. The scripts all have happy endings,
they’re really badly written, and they’re sending them to an English
Literature student,” she sniffs. With a rumoured £10m in a trust fund,
Watson can afford to work for whoever she wants. “Big budgets don’t interest
me. Blockbusters don’t interest me.” Poverty-stricken indie film-makers,
take note.
With so much movie mileage under her belt, you might think that Watson would
be utterly confident about her work, but rather endearingly, she has doubts.
Sometimes she still cries and feels out of her depth. In the last two films,
the actors are out of Hogwarts, out of their comfort zone. “But I hope I’m
always pushing myself,” says Watson, who took a five-week Shakespeare course
at Rada last summer. At first she felt insecure. But a few rapier fights and
sonnets later, she made some good friends. “They were really nice, really
protective of me.”
Watson is also very carefully protected by her motherly and highly
professional PR, Vanessa Davies, who has also looked after Radcliffe and
Grint since the start. Over lunch in a double-decker bus, fitted out as a
canteen, Davies says: “The story is that three child actors have grown up on
set and are perfectly normal. It’s a great story, but it’s not what some
parts of the media want.”
When Watson got the part in 2000, a photo was taken of Harry, 11, Hermione,
10, and Ron, 12, and “the announcement was on the internet, everywhere,
within five minutes. My stepmother grabbed a bag of clothes for me and we
all went to stay in the Landmark Hotel. The day after I was doing a press
conference for 50 journalists.” Watson shakes her head, as though she’s
still wondering what possessed her.
It’s been like that ever since. “Sometimes on a publicity tour I
can’t remember what time it is, what country I’m in.” She is so deeply
immersed in the final Potter double bill, that she can barely recall filming
Half-Blood Prince last year. “I was muddled up. But thankfully I’ve read
all the books about seven times, so I remember eventually.”
The media whirl never stops. As soon as Watson popped up a couple of times in
clubs in London, dressed in Chanel or Burberry, the press glommed onto her.
Davies says that on Watson’s 18th birthday, she had to warn her to make sure
she carefully did her hair and lipstick before leaving the party, to keep
the paparazzi at bay. On the web, there are “upskirt” shots taken in a taxi,
and headlines like “Snogwarts!” when Watson was photographed kissing her
boyfriend, 26-year-old Jay Barrymore.
“When they write, they make him older each time, like some 40-year-old,” moans
Watson. She says she mostly laughs it off and takes Davies’ advice: “Don’t
go to any premieres except your own.” When Watson saw a couple of her
words misquoted after the first Potter film, she cried, but now she reads
“everything about everyone with a pinch of salt”. The internet is
particularly frustrating. “Why do people put so much negative stuff out into
the world? Apparently I’m going to four different universities” – she has
been tipped for Harvard, Brown, Yale and Cambridge – and dozens of articles
claim wrongly she is the new face for Chanel’s Coco Mademoiselle perfume.
Watson now lives, rather discreetly, in Hampstead in her father’s house, with
her best friend. Her parents, both lawyers, divorced years ago and she has
step siblings. She travels between her mother in Oxford and her father in
London. But with the delights of the big city awaiting her, she says she is
mostly too tired to go out after shooting. Watson is also an avid reader,
and is in the middle of The Angel’s Game by Carlos Ruiz Zafón.
“The last couple of days we’ve been running for our lives, chased by Snatchers
again and again, through the forest,” says Watson. One of the
Snatchers, a grey-skinned werewolf, is lining up for pasta Bolognese at the
canteen trailer. “They’re real men, which is easier than doing it with an
imaginary creature in front of the green screen, but I’m so used to the
green screen I don’t mind. I suppose it’s a useful skill.” All those
computer-generated Hippogriffs and Trolls only appear to her in the final
cut.
Over the years, Watson has found different sides of Hermione emerged depending
on the different film directors. “With Chris [Columbus] it was the very
comic side – Hermione was swotty and bossy, a little madam. Then Alfonso
Cuarón brought out the girl-power element in her, and that fitted me
well when I was becoming a teenager. Then Mike Newell brought out her
sensitive side, a vulnerable, insecure teenager. He’d directed Four
Weddings and a Funeral and was interested in how relationships worked.
It was then that I really started acting, and stopped just playing the part.
It became deeper.” The cast enjoyed Newell. “Dan started calling him Sir,
and Mike would say to me, ‘Lovely take, Emma darling.’ I loved it when he
called me darling.”
Leaving Hogwarts
Watson’s director for the final three films is David Yates, whom she
says brought more shade and subtlety to Hermione. “David taught me that the
only thing that matters is the truth. His version is the truest, purest form
of Hermione, the most real.” Watson says she is more emotionally mature than
Hermione, and sometimes it shows on the screen and she needs a retake. “I
have to think myself back a couple of years, because Hermione’s never had a
boyfriend, never been kissed by a boy,” she says. But in the final
book, Hermione at last kisses Ron.
“The Kiss,” says Watson, looking sardonic. “I expect I’ll have to
talk a lot about The Kiss. We did it two weeks ago. Four takes one way, and
two takes with the camera in the other direction. Six takes altogether.”
As well as learning from the directors, a whole raft of Britain’s finest
thespians have passed through the Potter portals, including Alan Rickman,
Maggie Smith and John Hurt. But Watson’s two major mentors have been Emma
Thompson and Helena Bonham Carter.Recently, Watson went round to Bonham
Carter’s house to talk through a scene where her character, Bellatrix,
becomes Hermione after taking polyjuice. Bonham Carter wanted to know
everything about Hermione, to get the role right, and as Watson admits, “I
am a Harry Potter lexicon.” She also found Bonham Carter’s advice incredibly
useful. Both actresses started young and are not traditionally trained. “I
don’t come, like Dan [Radcliffe], from a very actorly family, so I was Bambi
in the headlights – I never had anyone to guide me,” explains Watson. “I
hadn’t been to Lamda or Rada, and I had a chip on my shoulder about it. But
Helena said I don’t need to get trained: she taught herself, read Chekhov,
books, theories, and she prepares herself so deeply for every role – the
more you know about a person, the more you move intuitively.”
Watson sighs. “I admire her so much, she is so confident in herself, so
happy. When she appears on the ‘worst-dressed’ list in Heat
she says, ‘Who cares?’ She is comfortable with who she is. She probably has
no idea how important those two or three hours with her were to me.” Watson
is all emotional. You want to hug her, except she’s far too English and
proper for that.
In the end, she has come out of the Potter tunnel alive and well. It has been
a most peculiar education. Watson has suddenly realised this and confesses
that she is writing everything down. “I wasn’t aware of it at the time, but
now it’s coming to an end, I’m trying to hold on to it. So I have a book,
and everyone I’ve met has a page. I want to remember them and not just be
left with the media version of what happened to me.” She pauses. “I don’t
want to ever forget the way I feel right now.”
Harry Potter and the Half-Blood Prince is released on July 7
