The Harry Potter franchise was a staple of many childhoods and some of the best fantasy movies of their era — they also starred children: the Harry Potter cast was largely made up of young kids who the audience grew up with.
For them, the Harry Potter movies defined their identities in Hollywood, and from Rupert Grint to Daniel Radcliffe, many have spoken up about the positives and negatives of headlining blockbusters at a sensitive age.
Emma Watson, who starred as the intelligent and determined Hermoine, recently opened up about her break from acting and how she felt caged in by her career.
“I wasn’t very happy, if I’m being honest,” Watson told the Financial Times. “I think I felt a bit caged. The thing I found really hard was that I had to go out and sell something that I really didn’t have very much control over. To stand in front of a film and have every journalist be able to say, ‘How does this align with your viewpoint?’ It was very difficult to have to be the face and the spokesperson for things where I didn’t get to be involved in the process.”
“I was held accountable in a way that I began to find really frustrating, because I didn’t have a voice, I didn’t have a say. And I started to realise that I only wanted to stand in front of things where if someone was going to give me flak about it, I could say, in a way that didn’t make me hate myself, ‘Yes, I screwed up, it was my decision, I should have done better.’”
Watson has since been absent to some degree from the acting scene but did appear in Disney‘s The Beauty and the Beast remake and 2019’s Oscar-nominated Little Women. She won’t be involved in HBO Max‘s new ventures.
For more on that, find out about the Harry Potter TV series release date, the Harry Potter and the Cursed Child release date, or the new movies coming in 2023.