‘Harry Potter’: Emma Watson Was Super Confused When She Learned She’d Been Cast as Hermione
When it comes to popular movie franchises, you’d be hard-pressed to find one bigger than Harry Potter. The eight films ensnared audiences around the globe and made billions of dollars. Furthermore, the movies catapulted the three main cast members, Daniel Radcliffe, Rupert Grint, and Emma Watson into superstardom. Thanks to their performances in the films, they became household names practically overnight.
It seemed that Watson was destined to play Hermione from the very beginning. Like her Harry Potter character, she took her role extremely seriously. She spent hours on end memorizing her lines and making sure she was overly prepared for the role. In fact, the Little Women alum even took things a step further and memorized the lines of her fellow castmates as well.
Emma Watson overprepared for the first ‘Harry Potter’ movie
“I got the role as Hermione in Harry Potter. I was nine and I loved learning my lines,” Watson shared in an interview with W Magazine. “I was completely obsessive and I would do it over and over and over again. Funnily enough, in the first Harry Potter film, if you watch carefully in some scenes you can see me mouthing Harry and Ron’s lines as well as my own because that’s just what I was like. I was crazy.”
But Watson wasn’t just obsessive about memorizing her lines. She was obsessive about the part before she even got cast. Since auditioning for the role of Harry Potter required several rounds of auditions, Watson used to wait by the phone for the call which would let her know if she’d progressed to the next round.
Watson had multiple auditions before she was cast as Hermione
“I ended up doing eight auditions to get my role,” the Harry Potter alum recalled. “I auditioned with maybe three or four different sets of Harrys. I would just literally like sit by the telephone and wait to get a phone call and sometimes it would be weeks. I learned then if you’re waiting for something to come it never comes. The phone call always came when I was out of the house. Always.”
Of course, when Watson finally got the news that she was being cast in Harry Potter, it wasn’t through a phone call at all. The then nine-year-old was invited into a meeting where they informed her that she’d booked the part. But, they used such specific language, Watson didn’t even realize that she had landed her dream role.
Watson was confused when she was told she booked ‘Harry Potter’
“They called me into the producer David Heyman’s very like pristine white office and he said ‘We just wanted to tell you that you are the preferred candidate for the role of Hermoine’. And I kept thinking ‘What does preferred candidate mean?'” Watson revealed about not realizing she’d been cast in Harry Potter.
But, in true Hermione fashion, it didn’t take too long for Watson to put the pieces together. No sooner than she got the news did the media descend, wanting to know every detail about the three main leads for the Harry Potter films.
“Within about half an hour they’d taken a photograph of Dan [Radcliffe], Rupert [Grint], and I which was then broadcast on the Internet that the three us had been cast,” Watson stated. “We moved straight into a hotel. There were press outside our house. It was like this crazy whirlwind; like something from a movie,” she recalled. Of course, that media attention continued for more than a decade. And while it likely took Watson some getting used to, we couldn’t imagine anyone else as Hermoine.
