Authors: David Nolan
Emma gave her feelings about the end of the series being nearly in sight: ‘I think I will feel emotional about it in some ways because I spent more than half my life doing it, you know, and the crew is like a second family to me; so it will be very emotional. But in the same time, I’m excited because it frees my time to go do other projects. I’m ready to go and do something else now, it has been a while!’
A week after the film’s release, a bizarre story hit the Internet and spread across the world within moments: ‘Millions are in shock after Emma Watson died overnight in a car crash,’ it read. ‘The 19-year-old actress, most famous for her roles in the Harry Potter films, was killed while being driven back to hotel after a screening of her latest movie,
Harry Potter and the Half-Blood Prince
, when a car collided with her vehicle. Watson is reported to have died at the scene. Her relatives have so far refused to comment, only quoting that they are “too distraught” to speak with the media. Police are questioning witnesses about two men who reportedly fled the scene following the crash.’
A similar – equally bogus – story had circulated about
Hannah Montana
star Miley Cyrus several months earlier.
Emma’s representatives were quick to release a statement of their own, in an attempt to stop the story in its tracks. It’s thought the fake story was connected to an Internet virus. ‘There is a very unpleasant hoax currently doing the rounds which reports that Emma has just been killed in a car accident in LA,’ the statement said. ‘Emma is of course alive and well and currently shooting the seventh Harry Potter film at Leavesden Studios in the UK. Needless to say, words cannot express our opinion as to people who make up this sort of horrid nonsense which is clearly purely aimed at mischief making.’
Online fakery involving Emma was at its height at this stage. She was clearly unhappy about it but at the same time she seemed to show a slightly old-fashioned view about having a presence on the Internet. ‘I have got fakes on Facebook, Bebo, MySpace, the lot,’ she said. ‘And it’s quite annoying. I can’t understand why people put themselves on there. Some of the pictures that they put up of themselves make them vulnerable because anyone can see. I think the Internet is very scary.’
There would be more fake stories to come: Emma started at Brown amid claims in the gossip pages that she had arrived on campus on her very first day by helicopter. Of course, she hadn’t: she’d arrived by car accompanied by her dad Chris. Despite this, the story spread like wildfire, with bloggers mocking her for blatantly not trying to fit in with student life. Unusually, a spokesman for Emma contacted the press to kill the tale: ‘She arrived by car as did everyone else. She has not nor will at any time travel to university by helicopter.’
One thing that definitely did happen on the first day was that she was ‘papped’. Snatched paparazzi pictures of her on campus, dressed in denim shorts and a white T-shirt, appeared in the press. She was on an orientation day with other students, taking part in activities to help students bond and find out what’s on offer on campus. Some newspapers questioned the effectiveness of university security if a photographer could take pictures of Emma on campus. It didn’t stop them printing the pictures of course. Mark Nickel, Brown’s director of communications, said, ‘We do whatever we need to do to ensure safety and privacy, and that applies pretty much to all students.’
It was a bad start to her new life. ‘It was just awful,’ she told
Vanity Fair
about her ‘freshman’ week, in an article headlined O
NE BEWITCHING COED
. ‘I was like, “I must be mad. Why am I doing this?”’
Her exasperation was heightened when some fellow students approached her and asked for her autograph. On top of the fake stories and the paparazzi shots it was too much – she broke down in tears. Regaining her composure, she told the autograph hunters, ‘I’m really sorry but I’m here to study and I just want to be a student. Would it be OK if I didn’t sign, because you’ll be seeing me around every day anyway?’
Emma has since said that that incident on the first day was the only problem she’s had at Brown. Gradually, she got into the rhythm of university life; she even went to her first frat party and was shocked by what she saw. ‘I felt like I’d walked into an American teen movie,’ she said, describing scenes straight out of
American Pie
or
Animal
House
. Despite the parties all around her, Emma remained alcohol-free. Although she was old enough to drink in Britain, in America she was underage and felt that ignoring the over-21 rule would be disrespectful. ‘Yes, I’m straight and boring,’ she admitted to
Vogue
magazine. ‘But I realised at a very young age that I was responsible for myself.’
‘Being at Brown has totally taken me out of my comfort zone,’ she told
Parade
. ‘I’m so proud that I went to a different country to study and really spread my wings. My dad was very set on my staying in the UK and going to Cambridge. So my decision to go to university in America kind of came out of nowhere for my parents. It took a while for my dad to come round, but they both said they would support me if it was what I wanted. I didn’t call home for three months. I’d send text messages, but it was too hard to pick up the phone: I’d just burst into tears. Dad told me, “Be yourself and you’ll be fine.” My mum was more like, “Make sure you wear a warm coat.” She sent me thermals and English chocolates.’
She signed up for an acting lessons – ‘I think actually I’m the worst in the class,’ she said – and agreed to take part in a student production of Anton Chekhov’s
The Three Sisters
. She had to audition twice before she got the part of Irina, the youngest of the sisters. ‘I’ve no idea how we managed it – we didn’t even have that long for rehearsal – but somehow we pulled it off – and got good reviews.’
She was experiencing a very new feeling. It took a while but she began to realise what this newfound sensation was: freedom. ‘It feels wonderful,’ she said. ‘I have such a
structure when I’m working on Potter. I get told what time I get picked up. I get told what time I can eat, when I have time to go to the bathroom. Every single second of my day is not in my power. Being at college, I took pleasure in the smallest things. Like, “I’m going to wake up at 10 o’clock if I want to.” Or, “I’m going to eat a sandwich now.” It was so liberating! I’d be smiling to myself, and friends would say, “Emma, what’s wrong?” … and I’d say, “I don’t know. I’m just … happy.’”
Inevitably, there were things that she missed about being so far from home: ‘The food, the food! Marks & Spencer’s food. I miss English chocolate. And I miss silly things like the adverts on TV.’
It was Emma’s Englishness rather than her fame that caused a lot of the initial interest in her – some of her fellow students believed she put ten points on to her IQ every time she opened her mouth: ‘At the very beginning they would pick up on everything I said,’ she recalled. ‘I’d say “jumper” and they’d go [adopts comedy English accent] “JAHM-PAH! After a while they just got used to it. My friend Madison made a list on her phone of all the different English slang I use. She has kind of like a translator so she can understand without having to ask me, “What on earth are you talking about when you say knackered?” Or what do I mean when I ask for Sellotape?’
Brown students seem to have gone out of their way to treat Emma just like everyone else, but sometimes – just sometimes – the temptation was just too much to resist. During one class when the lecturer asked the students a question, Emma’s hand shot up in the time-honoured
Hermione Granger fashion. When Emma answered correctly, one classmate couldn’t resist shouting out, ‘Twenty points for Gryffindor!’
Of course, other commitments would constantly impinge on her university education; but, just as she had done with her A levels, Emma believed that by knuckling down she would succeed. ‘I work really hard when I’m there and win my professors’ trust that I
am
hardworking and that I’ll come up with the goods somehow.’
Within a matter of weeks, she was back in Britain for a return visit to London Fashion Week. She was there as part of her Burberry contract as the show marked a bold move by the company to start shouting about its most iconic product, the brown check, which had been quietly sidelined during the company’s rebranding.
‘You know, it just felt like the right time for us,’ Angela Ahrendts told Sky News. ‘The city is celebrating 25 years of London fashion. It’s been unbelievable the support we have had. We are thrilled to be back. A tremendous amount of business is done here. It is a halo for the brand.’
Despite attendees including Victoria Beckham, Gwyneth Paltrow and Samantha Cameron, all eyes were on Emma. ‘Wearing a stunning metallic Burberry minidress and towering black heels, the 19-year-old actress turned heads as she arrived at the Burberry show,’ gushed the
Daily Mail
. ‘She even managed to upstage the perennially glamorous Victoria Beckham, who arrived in an understated black knee-length dress. Emma wore dark eye makeup and styled her hair in a loose up-do, proving she was perfectly at ease among the fashion know-how.
“Emma got the look just right,” one eyewitness said. “It would have been a big mistake to try an over-the-top outfit. Her dress wowed the crowds but looked sophisticated at the same time.”’
Burberry had chosen well in making Emma the face of their brand. ‘She’s a really hard worker, very ambitious but in a grounded, humble way, which is refreshing for the success she’s had,’ creative director Christopher Bailey told
Vogue
. ‘There’s no diva in that girl. I like the fact that she has a point of view. She’ll jump right into a project and give it her all. And she’s fun.’
Three weeks after London Fashion Week, financial commentators noted an upswing in Burberry’s fortunes. Despite the recession, the company’s sales figures for the second quarter of the year were up 5 per cent to £343 million. What’s more, shares in the company had doubled in value during the year as a whole.
The Emma Effect was being felt elsewhere thanks to her ‘day job’, too. Earlier that month
Guinness World Records
named Emma the highest-grossing young actor of the decade. It was estimated that her star power had generated an average of nearly £549 million per film since the start of her career. She managed to pip Daniel Radcliffe at the post – he earned the studios a mere £537 million per film on average – thanks to the success of
The Tale of Despereaux
.
Back at Brown, Emma Watson found that she was fading into the background of university life. ‘The amazing thing is that everyone here is interested in their own lives, so they aren’t nosy about mine,’ she told US journalist Jeanne
Wolf. ‘I’m used to people being intrusive and gossipy, but I can be anonymous. My best friend at Brown has never seen a Harry Potter movie or read the books. And one guy I dated didn’t know anything about the films, much less that I was one of the stars, which I found hilarious.’
Emma ensured that her university experience was the same as everyone else’s. Sharing a bathroom with seven others and going about her studies meant she generated less and less attention. One incident in particular brought home to her that she really was just another student: ‘One morning I was walking down the corridor from the bathroom with just a towel and I thought … I must be mad, anyone could tweet up my towel. But no one did.
‘I had serious issues with the code on my locker – remembering the numbers and how to turn it one way and then the other. I would be there for 15 minutes on the verge of tears because I couldn’t open this bloody locker to get my mail!’
If Emma thought that she had finally achieved the pri vacy she had longed for, she was sadly mistaken. In November, the
New York Post
– under the headline H
ARRY
P
OTTER STAR
E
MMA
W
ATSON UNDER THE SPELL OF A NEW MAN?
– printed pictures of Emma with fellow Brown student Rafael Cebrian, whom the paper described as a Spanish rock star. The pair were pictured at a New York Rangers ice hockey game at Madison Square Garden. ‘They were sitting with Yves Saint Laurent creative director Stefano Pilati,’ said an ‘onlooker’. ‘But Emma and Rafael looked like they were on a date. They were sitting very close together.’
Journalists soon found out more about the young Spaniard: he was a second-year student, a drummer with a band called The Monomes, and was a member of Brown’s student-run theatre group called the Production Workshop. When Emma was pictured a matter of weeks later on a holiday break in Jamaica with Jay Barrymore with ‘a face like thunder’, the press did the calculation and decided that she was splitting from Jay to be with Rafael. As ever, an ‘insider’ was on hand to provide the lowdown: ‘Emma and Jay, 28, were in trouble for months and with Emma at Brown University in America, the transatlantic gap proved too much for their relationship to survive. Emma has been spending a lot of time with Rafael and they are virtually inseparable.’
Emma maintained her silence, but in an interview with the
Sunday Times
in 2010 she set the record straight about her relationship with Rafael: ‘He was never, never, never my boyfriend,’ she said.
Despite this, Emma had successfully negotiated her first term – the start of a new life just as an old life was about to end. Despite the misgivings of her parents, the move to America had been a success. She had negotiated the tricky act of being low-key, while still being true to herself. ‘I worry that I might be seen to be name-dropping or boasting, so I have to constantly be self-deprecating,’ she said. ‘I feel people are always ready to jump on me. If I show any signs of being a diva or ungrateful, they’re just too ready to criticise. It’s like they’re desperate to find something they can hold on to. In the first semester I just didn’t talk about my life at home at all. Now I’ve realised
that’s just stupid. Harry Potter has been such a big part of my life that if I don’t mention it I’m being fake and my friends are only getting to know a very small part of me. Finally, I’m starting to be able to say, “Yes, I’m famous. Yes, I’m in the films. You’re just going to have to deal with it.” I’m not going to tiptoe around any more.’