Hermione Granger almost left Hogwarts halfway through.
Around the fifth film, Emma Watson was close to walking away from the role, and the people running the franchise knew it.
She was about 16. Below is what she, her co-stars and the filmmakers said about it.
When Did Emma Watson Want To Quit Harry Potter?
Around Harry Potter and the Order of the Phoenix.
David Yates, new to the series as its director, said the producer and the studio warned him about his Hermione early on.
Their message: “Emma is not sure she wants to come back to do another Potter”.
Her contract was up for renewal in 2006, in the middle of that production, so the doubt had a deadline attached.
Why She Nearly Walked Away
Watson explained it in the 2022 reunion special, Return to Hogwarts, sitting across from Rupert Grint.
Emma Watson, Rupert Grint and Daniel Radcliffe attend a photocall to present the new cast of the Harry Potter Films, London, August 23, 2000 – @Getty
She placed the turning point at Order of the Phoenix, “when things started getting spicy for all of us”.
Her short version: “I think I was scared”.
She asked Grint if he ever hit a tipping point where the job felt like “This is kind of forever now”.
The cause had a name. “The fame thing had finally hit home in a big way,” she said.
She went back to a diary entry from those months, and it was not a happy one. “At times, I was lonely,” she admitted.
What Her Co-Stars Noticed
Tom Felton pointed to something the boys had and she lacked.
@Getty
He had his Slytherin crew. Daniel Radcliffe and Grint had each other.
Watson, in his words: “Emma was not only younger, she was by herself”.
Radcliffe admitted none of them asked how she was doing.
At 14, he said, that was not a question one teenage boy put to another.
Grint had his doubts. He described “contemplating what life would be like if I called it a day,” and said the two of them never talked about it at the time.
School Was Part Of The Problem
Producer David Heyman gave another angle in 2013.
Rupert Grint, Emma Watson and Daniel Radcliffe at the world premiere of Harry Potter And The Deathly Hallows: Part 2 – 2011 – @Getty
Watson was the most academic of the three and struggled with each new contract more than the others.
According to Heyman, those talks were never about money. Her question was: “Do I want to be a part of this?”.
Watson knew how fans would have taken it.
In an MTV interview from the Deathly Hallows years, she said leaving for college would have made her “public enemy #1.”
Why She Stayed
She signed, finished all 8 films and studied on the side.
She started at Brown University in 2009 and graduated with an English literature degree in May 2014.
For the 20th anniversary of the first film, she posted on Instagram about how lucky she knew she was.
Katie Leung, Stanislav Ianevski, Clemence Poesy, Robert Pattinson, Rupert Grint, Daniel Radcliffe and Emma Watson attend the photocall for “Harry Potter And The Goblet Of Fire” 2005 – @Getty
Watson joked about a journalist who once complained she said “lucky” in interviews way more than necessary.
Doubt Came Back Later
The fame question never fully went away.
In 2023 she told the Financial Times she “wasn’t very happy” acting, and she stepped back after Little Women.
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I am Bulgarea Candin Stefan, and I founded FamousPeopleToday.com in 2018. I’m using my bachelor’s degree in economics and 9 years of experience in blogging to guide millions of people through the incredibly complex world of celebrity net worths.