50 Favorite Emma Watson Photoshoots/Appearances/Candids
Emma has got to be my favorite actress of all time. I'm sure a very large part of that has to do with my love for Harry Potter, but honestly, after seeing quite a few film adaptations of books, it's a lot easier to hate characters you love in books when they're put on the big screen, but I've always thought she does a really great job as Hermione. I think i would still love her even if she wasn't in Harry Potter because acting really does seem like just a job to her. She doesn't take it insanely seriously, where it's her whole life, which is quite a feat for any celebrity. Another thing that's great about her is that she tries super hard, at pretty much everything. I can't imagine doing school and that much work and somehow still getting amazing grades/test scores. And the fact that she gets an education even though she has enough money to really never have to work again, tells a lot about how. I also love how she's always been grateful for being cast in Harry Potter instead of just complaining about fame/lost childhood. She just seems extremely well balanced. I honestly cannot understand the hate for her. Plus she's proved you can be famous and still avoid a lot of attention.
The order is not 100% chronologically correct bc I've been super busy lately and didn't have time, but it should be at least kind of close. And somehow some of my favorites aren't even on this list. I just have too many. Lots of the quotes are kind of random, especially some of the stories bc i just thought they were interesting. I wish I hadn't been so busy this month so I could have done it a little bit better.
Premieres
“I had no idea of the scale of the film-the fame-or I would have been completely overwhelmed.”
“When I heard I’d got the part of Hermione, my mother said to me it was very important to keep the friends I’d made already. She told me that in the future it would be important to know people liked me for myself and not because of my career. At the time I didn’t believe her. I was so excited I couldn’t care, but now I know exactly what she means.”
“I rehearsed and rehearsed and rehearsed. When I got the part, people were like, ‘Why you?’ And I just remember seeing a L’Oréal advert, and coming out with an American accent, ‘Because I’m worth it.’ That was my answer then. My answer now is . . . I don’t know, I just really got her.”
“Maybe it’s because, at the moment, there are so many people who want to be famous, so how could I not want this? Or, how could I not want to keep it forever? But I guess I just want to be sure it’s what I want. I was so young, and I don’t think I really knew the greatness of what I was signing on for. I really want to study. I would love to try theater. I need to try stuff out.”
“You’re seeing someone who’s going to be an enormous movie star. You’re seeing someone who just brings so much craft and dignity in what she does and approaches it. Look at her contemporaries … and look at how this girl is handling both her career and her attitude toward her craft, and how in control of her craft she is. I’ve worked with a lot of actors and she can make complex adjustments on a dime. She has tremendous control. This is a very sophisticated actress already.” - Gary Ross
“They are remarkable children, really. They are very down-to-earth. They are very gifted. They are lovely kids.” - David Yates
“It’s difficult to talk about the things we missed when we gained so much. We probably had to grow up a lot quicker than normal children, we had a lot of responsibility. In that sense it was difficult and a lot of pressure, but the experience has been so amazing and unique.”
“I think she is the most talented young actress of her generation. I think of everybody coming out of the Harry Potter movies, with all due respect to them, she’s the one you go, ‘Oh my god, this is a classic movie star and will have a very, very long career.'” - Gary Ross
Press Conferences
“I will look back on this part of my life and I know it will be special, but it used to be that if I ever had a bad review or someone said, 'Oh, she is too this,' or 'She's too that,' I got upset about it. Now what I have worked out is that it would actually be physically impossible to be perfect for everyone. Everyone has a distinct idea in their head of what each character is like. So I've kind of had to lower my standards. I can't be perfect for everyone. J.K. thinks I'm perfect, and that's good enough for me.”
“It’s quite hard to imagine my life without Harry Potter; it’s sort of hard to remember my life before. It’s sort of completely taken over my life. I say that, but I’ve worked hard to make sure that hasn’t happened. While obviously it’s a huge part of me, it doesn’t define me. I know who I am aside from this. But it feels strange that one day it will be over. In a way though I feel it will never be over … the books will always be loved and the films will come on every Christmas and it’ll keep living on in kids’ imaginations and adults’ imagination for many years to come.”
“They are the same enthusiastic people that they were when I first started.” - Jason Isaacs
On the Set
“You barely notice yourself growing up when it’s happening, but I guess that’s what has happened, really. It’s very peculiar looking back on them and seeing how much I’ve changed and how much I’ve grown and what I looked like before all this happened.”
“I wanted everything to be so perfect. I would work so hard to memorize my lines and the scene; we would have to stop shooting because I was mouthing Rupert’s and Dan’s lines at the same time. That’s something I had to get over.”
“My little brother, Toby, who’s three, gets very cross with me sometimes because when he sees me in Harry Potter he can’t understand how I can be Emma and Hermione at the same time.”
“These kids have worked bloody hard for all these years, on set and off set in school. It’s bloody hard work for them and I think they’ve done it with great grace and ability and humility. They’re so professional. That’s what (you have to be.) There’s no time for messing about!”- Imelda Staunton
“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.”
Appearances
“They were trying to make me stay realistic-but I wasn’t having any of it. I was going to get that part. This is a sweet thing: My dad did a roast on a Sunday, and he gave me the wishbone, and I obviously made the wish that I would get this role. I still have that wishbone upstairs in my jewelry box.”
“I think when you take away all, like, the premieres and press stuff and all the special effects, then you just come down to the fact that it's all about acting, and I think that has been the best bit for me.”
“She is also incredibly hardworking. Our schedule was murderous, and she never once complained, even when she was white with exhaustion.” - Heidi Thomas
“I don’t want other people to decide who I am. I want to decide that for myself. I want to avoid becoming too styled and too ‘done’ and too generic.”
“David Heyman actually invited Rupert and me to come in. We sat down in his office-very casual-and he said, 'You’ve got the part.' I was so shocked and I just stood there and said, 'Pinch me!'”
“I could be 100 years old and in my rocker..but i'll still be very proud that I was part of the Harry Potter films.”
“There’s nothing interesting about looking perfect-you lose the point. You want what you’re wearing to say something about you, about who you are.”
“But I think I needed to have an experience outside of Harry Potter because, in a way, I was really plucked out of obscurity and given this role. I mean, I really wanted it but it never felt like a decision that I made. It just happened to me. I felt that I won the lottery. So I’ve always kind of slightly questioned it.”
“The funny thing is I never realized that I was going to be famous. It never really occurred to me. I was just auditioning for parts and I just loved the character so much. I felt that I knew how to play her and I could be her, and Chris Columbus gave me a lot of confidence. And the fame thing never really hit home, it never did. When you’re doing a movie you’re kind of in a bubble and you don’t really realize the impact it’s having on the rest of the world. It comes in these surreal moments, like a premiere or a film coming out, and I realized that I am famous, but most of the time I forget.”
On her driver - “I love Nigel! You know, he drove me to that first audition, and he’s been driving me ever since. He’s like my best friend-he knows everything about my life. If you have to sit in the car with someone for two hours a day, you had better like him! I get very jealous when he drives someone else.”
“For me, this is just the beginning. I’ve only shown a little bit of what I can do. There is so much more to come.”
“People see me as Hermione in real life. They forget that I’m acting. We’re quite different people. I want people to understand that I’m versatile.”
“I guess, just I was able to do things from such a young age that I never would have been able to do. Always traveling and being given all this responsibility and freedom, so I’ve never really had any barrier to break I guess. I’ve been able to kind of - - I don’t really have anything to rebel against. I’m quite lucky really.”
“I’ve been asked to sign weird things - like someone’s arm in permanent ink, which I didn’t want to do because I was worried they’d get blood poisoning.”
“In the beginning Harry Potter was something that happened to me. I didn’t understand what was happening to me and I absolutely didn’t know how to behave: it was like I’d landed in the eye of a tornado. But when I got older, I gained self-confidence. I also pay more and more attention to the technical aspects: what would it look like if I stood here? How do I have to stand in front of the camera to look right? Sometimes I even raise my voice against the director.”
“They’re remarkably unaffected. They’re kids. They’re quite grown up kids, quite composed, but they’re having a good time. They’re not cynical, they’re not pretentious, they’re not arrogant. They’re humble and frankly very much the same kids that I loved when I began the process.” - David Heyman
“Emma has a classic beauty, a great character and a modern edge. Her charm, intellect and brilliant sense of fun made the whole shoot feel like a picnic on the Thames.” - Christopher Bailey
Photoshoots
“It’s the scariest thing that’s ever happened to me, it’s the biggest thing that’s ever happened to me, and it’s the best thing that’s ever happened to me! I really enjoyed making the film and I’d love to think that people would look up to me. That’s very flattering.”
“There were 300 extras in the same room for one whole week. Everyone is dying of boredom and they need to be laughing; Robbie Coltrane had to stand up on the tables and dance. They did the Macarena and the cancan, and it worked! It was the highlight of the whole filming! I never laughed so much in my life.”
“Personally, I don’t actually think it’s even that sexy. What’s sexy about saying, “I’m here with my boobs out and a short skirt… have a look at everything I’ve got”? My idea of sexy is that less is more. The less you reveal the more people can wonder.”
Candids
“I hate seeing my name on the front of a magazine. I’ll walk past a Tube station and see something about me, and I try not to read it but it’s hard. Who doesn’t want to read about themselves? But it’s always written with this tone - as if the person knows me. But they don’t..”
“I think it’s hard for people to know how to act when they meet me. Some people try incredibly hard to avoid anything to do with Harry Potter, fame or acting or whatever, and I really do appreciate it, but it can be quite awkward too. It’s hard meeting new people, for them to know quite what to do.”
“Most of the change happened during the first film. I occasionally get recognized. I think everyone’s been a bit more enjoyable on the second film, because they know the people and they know what they’re doing.”
“I have a more normal life than people expect. When I take public transport, people are like, ‘That girl looks like the girl from ‘Harry Potter’, but it can’t be her on the train.'”
“It was always my dream (to go to university) before I did the films and so I don’t see why I should change it.”
“I don’t consider myself to be a celebrity. I don’t fit that mold. I worry that people have expectations of me being someone I’m not. I’m just finding myself and trying to live as normally as possible and be as normal as possible.”
“Daniel, Rupert and me have been incredibly protected doing the Harry Potter movies. There seems to be this feeling that all of us were bursting to break out of these images we had created but that’s never been the case. We all share the same view. None of us court celebrity, none of us want to be part of the game.”
“Daniel and Rupert are really sure about being actors the rest of their lives. As far as I'm concerned, I don't want Harry Potter to be my last performance. I'd like to play other kind of characters and have a tryout at the theatre, because I like the automatic response from the audience.”
“Recently a woman took my arm, looked at me very seriously and said, ‘You’re quite pretty in real life.’ I didn’t quite know how to take it.”
“The best thing about being involved in Harry Potter, is that you can make a six year old girl or boy’s day by giving them a handshake and it’s so easy. It costs me so little to make someone incredibly happy so that’s amazing and I’ve walked away and thought ‘God I’m so lucky to be in a position that people are that excited to meet me’. It’s amazing. The downside is that the level of curiosity into your life means that it becomes quite intrusive and the level of criticism is hard to deal with sometimes. It can make you really insecure.”
“I think Emma could have a great career. If she’s smart enough to choose the right material she could be fantastic. We have seen a fraction of what she’s capable of yet.” - David Yates
“I get stopped by people, but that’s fine. I’d never want to be so famous that I couldn’t live a normal life to a certain extent. I can’t imagine anything lonelier, just not being able to be part of the real world and being trapped and locked in hotel rooms and cars.”
On other child/teen actors - “I think it’s hard. I can totally understand why they go nuts with the level of interest in their lives and the pressure to be perfect - and they’re teenagers. And that’s what you do, you screw up. It’s really hard so I would never criticize that.”
“I will be uncontrollable. It’s been half of our lives. It’s made us, it’s formed us. It’s such a big part of my life, so it will be really sad-and so much of the crew who have been there since the beginning are like my family.”