Harry Potter star Emma Watson last last appeared in 2019’s Little Women. On Jay Shetty’s podcast, the 35-year-old reflected on her career.
She revealed that she had a hard time finding friends in Hollywood. Something she described as “bone-breakingly painful”. “I was coming to those sets with an expectation that I think I had developed on Harry Potter, which was that the people I worked with were going to be my family and that we were going to be lifelong friends,” she said. She quickly found out that people were mostly focused on their career. “And I was not of that mindset.”
The former actress, who played Hermione Granger from 2001 to 2011, said she carried the closeness of the Harry Potter cast into later work — only to face rejection. “It’s so unusual to make a set of films for 12 years and we were a community,” she recalled. “And so I took that as an expectation into my other workplaces, and I just got my ass kicked. I really did.”
Asked what made friendships difficult, Watson answered, “I think it was a combination. It was a Molotov cocktail of all of the above.” She admitted she is “not thick-skinned,” adding, “maybe I wasn’t built for those highly competitive environments.”
Watson also spoke about the illusion of closeness during film promotion: “You always get asked when you’re promoting these big films, ‘So do you guys hang out on set and like are you all friends?’ … But the truth is no one has seen each other outside of work … Everyone’s so tired that when they get any time off you’re going straight back to your hotel room.”