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There’s a spot in the English countryside near London where you’ll find a dingy-looking old factory that used to make Rolls Royce airplane engines. But that ugly exterior hides magic brewing inside. The factory is now Leavesden Studios, which has been home to the Harry Potter movies since the beginning, and where on this day Harry Potter and the Half-Blood Prince is being transformed from words on a page to a big-screen reality.
All the familiar Hogwarts rooms remain permanently dressed from year to year. Workers age the props from one movie to the next so that the place looks like it is being well used, especially after bad things take a toll on poor Hogwarts. The rooms are huge, and gorgeous. But if you step outside one of them, the exterior is just wood framing and plywood. Step back in, and the magic of the movies returns.
It’s here that I sat down with Emma Watson to discuss playing Hermione Granger, a role that has defined the actor since she was just 10 years old. “It’s funny,” Watson says about winning the role, “because it happened to me when I was so young. You barely notice yourself growing up when it’s happening, but I guess that’s what has happened, really.”
By the time the series is over, Watson, who turned 19 in April, will have spent most of her life involved with Harry Potter.
Befitting the age of the stars and their characters, the new movie will have some funny romantic moments to offset the series’ increasingly darker tone. Harry (Daniel Radcliffe) falls in love with Ginny Weasley (Bonnie Wright), Ron’s sister, and Ron (Rupert Grint) pursues his romance with Lavender Brown (Jessie Cave).
But, inevitably, the story churns toward its heavy climax as Harry looks into the suspicious activities of Draco Malfoy (Tom Felton) and Severus Snape (Alan Rickman) and investigates the meaning of an old potions textbook that belonged to the mysterious Half-Blood Prince. Eventually, it becomes clear that Lord Voldemort is leading another wizard war, violent enough that even Muggles are seeing evidence of it in their world.
Meanwhile, Professor Dumbledore (Michael Gambon) and Harry search for the six splinters of Voldemort’s soul, a.k.a. the Horcruxes, because as long as just one remains, Voldemort cannot be killed.
As for Hermione, her main role is to be a friend to Harry so he doesn’t feel alone in his fight. “I think Hermione has a massive part to play in Harry’s success,” says Watson. “She teaches him that the only way to defeat Voldemort is through having his friends, and trusting his friends.”
In real life, like in the movie, Watson, Radcliffe and Grint are now young adults with real lives. Radcliffe is doing other movies and starred in a major play in London and on Broadway. Grint is branching out with other movies, too. And on the personal front, Watson just went public with her first serious boyfriend. Jay Barrymore is a 27-year-old British businessman. They have been dating for a year.
“It’s very peculiar looking back on [the films] and seeing how much I’ve changed and how much I’ve grown and what I looked like before all this happened,” Watson says. She evens jokes that, in those first movies, she looked “like a chipmunk” with her baby face. Then she started maturing, along with Radcliffe and Grint. “In a way, that’s what people really identify with. It makes it a real journey, a very real journey, because we literally are growing up with the characters.”
Watson had never acted professionally before being cast in the original Harry Potter movie by American director Chris Columbus. Her only experience was in school plays.
She is not even originally from England. Watson was born in Paris, France, and lived there with her parents until she was five. Her maternal grandmother is French and Emma still speaks a bit of the language. Both parents, now divorced and remarried, are English lawyers. After the divorce, Watson went back to England with her mother, Jacqueline Luesby, and her brother Alex.
In her new life, Watson soon became interested in acting. Part-time, she started attending the Stagecoach Theatre Arts school and studying singing, dancing and acting. Her theatre teacher there recommended Watson to the Harry Potter casting directors and she earned the role after eight auditions.
With her young-adult perspective, Watson now realizes what she is part of. And it amazes her because she thinks the fantasy world created by Harry Potter author J.K. Rowling is so sophisticated. “For such mainstream entertainment, it has such depth. It is very complex and I think that is why I wouldn’t just call it a kids’ book,” says Watson.
“Everything about the book, everything about J.K. Rowling’s world, is thought down to the very last detail. You can pull apart the spells and they’re Latin and they actually mean what they are doing. And all the names are so interesting and so unique and different and everyone has their own history. And how she’s come up with all of this is just so amazing. At the end of each book, it’s almost like an Aesop’s Fable. Every time, every year, there is a lesson that Harry learns.”
Speaking of lessons, two years ago Watson created a fuss by speculating that she might quit acting completely and just go to school, where she is a straight-A student. Neither she nor her co-stars were originally signed to the Potter series past number four. She somewhat reluctantly agreed to film number five.
Then, in the summer of 2007, Watson shot her first non-Potter project, a movie called Ballet Shoes for Britain’s BBC television.
“Having an experience outside of Harry Potter really helped me,” Watson says. “I think it really convinced me that this is where I belong and this is what I am meant to be doing, that I do want to be an actress. But I think I needed to have an experience outside of Harry Potter because, in a way, I was just plucked from obscurity and given this role. I mean, I really wanted it but I never felt that it was a decision I made. It just happened to me. I felt I won the lottery.”
Source: Cineplex
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