Emma Watson (5 page)

Not only was she professional, she was now also very, very famous, rapidly becoming the best-known 11-year-old in the world. ‘The funny thing is I never realised that I was going to be famous,’ she told reporters at the film’s launch. ‘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 realise 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 realised that I am famous, but most of the time I forget.’

As the young stars made the most of the red-carpet limelight, production staff were already prepping scenes for them to film for Part Two of the series. Time was clearly of the essence: the three children were growing up fast, and it was even claimed that producers were rushing
into Harry Potter II to beat the onset of puberty that was heading for Daniel Radcliffe. A spokesman for Warner Bros said, ‘The filming of the second film is a natural progression. As for Daniel’s voice breaking, we will cross that bridge when we come to it.’

Whatever the future held, one thing was certain: Emma Watson would be for ever bound in the public mind with her co-stars Daniel Radcliffe and Rupert Grint. They had embarked together on a journey like no other – a journey that only they would ever truly understand. ‘We are really good friends,’ Emma said. ‘It would be really hard if we weren’t good friends. We’ve made a really good trio.’

E
mma Watson’s parents – although divorced – still acted as one in terms of their daughter. They had made several key decisions relating to Emma and her newfound fame. One was that they decided not to tell her how much money she was now earning as work began on the second of the Harry Potter films. ‘It’s easier that way,’ Emma reasoned. Another was how they would choose to continue living their own lives despite their daughter’s job as a movie star. The parents of both Daniel Radcliffe and Rupert Grint had given up their jobs to concentrate full time on helping their children through the Potter experience. Tellingly, Emma’s career-minded parents did not. ‘Both my parents love their work, it’s a big part of their identity,’ she later told the
Sunday
Times
. ‘And, if Mum’s whole life revolved around me, she wouldn’t have been at home for my younger brother.’

Despite being confident her daughter could cope, it didn’t stop Emma’s mum from being concerned about her. But the consistency that Emma lacked shuttling between her parents was starting to come from elsewhere. As well as the regular crew and on-set tutors, Emma had a regular driver, Nigel, to take her to and from the set. ‘He drove me to that first audition, and he’s been driving me ever since,’ Emma told
Interview
magazine. ‘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.’

Emma also had two on-set female chaperones – like two wonderful older sisters, she said. The world of Harry Potter was becoming the most regular part of her young life. ‘I got a lot of love and affection on set, but being the only girl sometimes was tough.’

Reuniting with Daniel and Rupert for
Harry Potter and the Chamber of Secrets
was easy – the tight schedule between the first and second films plus the promotional duties in Britain and the US meant they had barely been apart. The press became fascinated by the nature of the relationship among the three. One of the most constant questions Emma would have to face over the next decade was just
how well
she liked her co-stars. She became highly adept at batting the query away. ‘We get along great, but I don’t have a crush on them,’ she told
Girl’s Life
. ‘I know them too well. I do have to keep them on their toes and show them who’s boss.’

If Radcliffe and Grint were indeed under Emma’s thumb, the two boys did manage, on occasion, to get their own
back. During one scene on
Chamber of Secrets
, they arranged for an extra to give her a fright. The extra had been covered from top to toe in tattoos by the makeup department and was lying in wait to surprise Emma on the Knockturn Alley set. The boys told her to take a look at something interesting that was behind a curtain in a shop window. ‘I went and pulled back this curtain and there was this man – at a brief glance I thought he was practically naked – covered in tattoos, just sat there in this chair. Dan and Rupert were just laughing and laughing and laughing at me. Very embarrassing.’

The three had become a unit, with the relationship being compared to that of brothers and sister. The toing and froing of her family life in the ‘real’ world became more complex as her parents’ new families grew, and changed, making her the big sister to several siblings. ‘My family has exploded in the last two to three years, so it’s nice to be the baby when I’m working,’ she told the
Daily Mail
. ‘I’m the youngest [of the three Potter stars] and I’m a girl, so Dan and Rupert are really protective of me; they are like my brothers. If I’m feeling a bit anxious or I need to talk something over with someone, Dan’s the one I’ll go to. We had this great weekend once. We were stuck in the middle of nowhere in Scotland in this castle. We were both meant to be in bed and I sneaked into Dan’s room and stayed up watching movies all night, drinking Coke and eating M&Ms from the minibar. Rupert’s the guy I go to when I want to be relaxed and have a good laugh. His dressing room is like a child’s wonderland with every kind of game, every kind of sweet, every kind of whatever you can
imagine. I go to him if I want to snuggle up on the sofa and watch television.’

Having read the
Chamber of Secrets
book, Emma was aware that Hermione spends a fair chunk of it stiff as a board thanks to a petrifying spell. Not an ideal way to show off her acting skills, but she was aware of how the character had developed since the first outing. ‘It was her first year at Hogwarts, she’s settled down a bit, chilled out a bit,’ she told
AOL Movies
. ‘She’s not as obsessed with all the school work. It’s a good film for her. She’s got some really good lines – Hermione doesn’t stick to two syllables, it’s got to be about six. She’s the only girl so she gets to boss everybody about – girl power – she kicks ass!’

When it came to directing
Chamber of Secrets
, director Chris Columbus had learned his lesson from the first film, where he’d been unhappy with the quality of the special effects. This time, scenes where the actors had to interact with computer-generated images were shot first, giving the team nine months to get the effects right. ‘We started shooting three days after
Sorcerer’s
[
Philosopher’s
]
Stone
opened,’ Columbus told US interviewer Charlie Rose. ‘There was a certain sense of relief. The film had done well at the box office. The kids and myself started to feel a sense of relief. The author trusted us, the studio trusted us. Then we started to make the film we really wanted to make. We started to improvise a little more, we started to have fun with the material.’

‘The second time round, we had experience behind us and knew the cast and crew,’ Emma told CBBC. ‘It was
really good fun and everyone was a lot more comfortable with that.’

But Emma and her two co-stars were developing as film performers – and growing up before our very eyes on cinema screens around the world. Because she was the only girl, Emma’s self-consciousness was even more acute. She was greatly relieved that, for the new film, Hermione’s ratty hairdo would be calmed down a little.

‘It’s a bit of a new context when you’re doing it on screen,’ she later said in an interview with the
Daily Telegraph
. ‘I remember, especially with the earlier films, Dan and Rupert would grow like a couple of inches by the end of shooting because it was so long, or by the time the film was released, and that was kind of crazy. And I remember on the second one I was still losing teeth, so that was interesting. It was kind of a weird experience trying to like make the whole growing-up process run smoothly. We kind of had to do it without anyone realising. Everyone always asks this question: “Is it really hard growing up on screen?” And I’m just like “Well, I’ve never grown up any other way, so I don’t know.” It’s just kind of the way it’s always been and you deal with it, I guess. It’s just the way it is.’

‘These kids are actually becoming seasoned professionals,’ Chris Columbus told Hollywood.com. ‘It used to take ten or eleven takes to get to a certain point. Now it takes three or four. They’re just very, very secure.’

The takes may have been getting easier for Columbus, but for Emma the nature of Hermione’s character meant that sections of the script were almost designed to trip her
up. ‘There are so many scenes where I literally couldn’t say my lines. Hermione gets such mouthfuls, it’s like a tongue twister in each paragraph. She talks like a dictionary. She
is
a dictionary.’

Despite Columbus giving himself more time to create the special effects, the schedule would again be tight to get the film into cinemas by November. The crew returned to many of the locations used in the first film, but there would be new challenges too. Privet Drive was recreated at Leavesden Studios for the scene where Harry is rescued by the Weasleys with their borrowed Ford Anglia.

The rambling, slightly ramshackle world of Leavesden had become a third home to Emma – after her mum’s in Oxford and her dad’s in London – albeit a very unusual third home. ‘You will be in the canteen and there will be all these witches and wizards and ghosts and ghouls queuing up,’ she told the
Daily Mail
. ‘I get a reality check whenever my family or friends come and a centaur goes galloping by. They’ll be sitting there staring but I just don’t see it because I’ve never known anything different.’

Cast and crew also ventured outside Leavesden: Black Park in Buckinghamshire was used as the Forbidden Forest and production was shifted to Ealing studios in west London for two weeks to film scenes in a large-scale water tank.

Richard Harris returned as Dumbledore. The veteran actor took great delight in working with his young
co-stars
, telling the BBC he was ‘envious’ of Emma, Dan and Rupert. ‘Their heads are in a place that we have grown out of. There is a place that’s committed to fantasy, and
their heads are in the right place, and their souls are in the right place.’

For animal lover Emma – she had two cats, Bubbles and Domino, at her mother’s house in Oxford – one of the delights of
Chamber of Secrets
was working with animals on set, including Hagrid’s dog Fang. ‘I really love animals and enjoy working with them. It can be quite hard. It’s very hard to tell a dog, “Do it again, you weren’t sitting in the right position.” You have to be quite patient because Fang drools everywhere. It takes ages to get [it] off your robes, and Hedwig flies in the wrong direction. Most of the time they get it right, which is absolutely amazing! Their trainers must have the hardest job ever.’

There were new cast members joining the family, too: Liverpool-born Jason Isaacs devoured all four of the Potter books in one go before auditioning for the part of
pureblood
wizard Lucius Malfoy, the father of Harry’s Hogwarts arch enemy, Draco. Isaacs says he was made to feel more than welcome by the cast. ‘It was like turning up to a very good party where all of the people are just slightly bored of each other and are thrilled when the doorbell rings,’ Isaacs told the BBC. ‘They were terribly welcoming.’ Malfoy, with his mane of white hair, walking cane and condescending voice was, in Isaacs’s words, ‘completely supreme in his arrogance and his ruthlessness’.

A very different kind of arrogance was on display thanks to another new addition – preening celebrity wizard Gilderoy Lockhart, played by Kenneth Branagh. ‘Lockhart is the new Defence Against the Dark Arts teacher,’ Branagh told
Total Film
. ‘An apparently fantastically successful
wizard and writer whose books are now being used as textbooks at Hogwarts. He is a narcissus, a gadfly, very full of himself and faintly idiotic. But he can also be rather touching at times. He is certainly a strange peacock of a man. J. K. Rowling describes Lockhart in a much more impressionistic way than many of the other characters. She talks of his “flowing golden locks”, which we’ve tried to match with an excessive hairdo. She also talks of his dandyish quality, which Chris Columbus was keen to exploit. Lockhart’s character is a chance to splash some colour into the movie.’

J. K. Rowling had spent a great deal of time denying that many of her characters were based on people she knew. Not so with Lockhart: ‘I have only once set out to depict somebody I have met,’ Rowling later explained on her website. ‘The result was Gilderoy Lockhart. I assure you that the person on whom Gilderoy was modelled was even more objectionable than his fictional counterpart. He used to tell whopping great fibs about his past life, all of them designed to demonstrate what a wonderful, brave and brilliant person he was. Perhaps he didn’t really believe he was all that great and wanted to compensate, but I’m afraid I never dug that deep. You might think it was mean of me to depict him as Gilderoy, but you can rest assured he will never, ever guess. He’s probably out there now telling everybody that he inspired the character of Albus Dumbledore. Or that he wrote the books and lets me take the credit out of kindness.’

In Emma’s view, there was one person who definitely did not think Lockhart was objectionable: ‘Hermione is seriously dreamy about Lockhart – he is the Brad Pitt of 
her day.’ She seemed almost as enthusiastic about Kenneth Branagh. ‘He is the nicest guy,’ she told the Scholastic website. ‘He is absolutely fantastic. He’s really down to earth, really friendly, and he has a great sense of humour. I really liked working with him. He’s a fantastic actor as well. There’s such a presence about him.’

Columbus continued with his hands-on directing style with the young stars he began with on the first film. ‘It feels like he’s in there with you,’ Emma told journalists at a press conference to promote the film. ‘It’s not like he’s standing at the monitor and goes “cut”. Before every take, Chris would say “go sprint”. So I would literally have to run or do star jumps and stuff just to get excited because we could get really tired.’

Emma maintained her energy levels on set by eating her favoured chocolate bars – Crunchies. Daniel’s chocolate of choice was Mars bars. Rupert Grint appears to have been not too fussy about what sweets or chocs he got his hands on. Perhaps because of this – plus the onset of their teenage years – the young stars began to appear a little less
fresh-faced
than on the first film. ‘Thankfully, the boys were going through spots at the same time,’ Emma told
The Times
. ‘So we had a dermatologist doing the rounds. She gave me something that burnt the skin off my face. It was terrible. They couldn’t hold filming; we just had to put more makeup on, which made it really sore. The head of makeup promised me she wouldn’t let them put anything out there where my skin looked bad, and I had to trust her. But it took a lot out of me to put myself in front of cameras with my skin like that.’

They may have been growing as performers, but these were still young people on the brink of adolescence – that most sensitive and awkward of times. One moment on set would highlight the entire issue. ‘I asked Emma to hug Dan,’ said Columbus, ‘and she said, “No way,” and that was the day she was the most nervous being on the set. She was like, “I am not going to hug him, no I’m not.” And I said, “You’ve been petrified, this is one of your best friends, if not your
best
friend, you have to hug him,” I said, “but you
won’t
hug Ron, because
that’s
where the tension is.’