“I Came To Work Looking For Friendship.” Emma Watson Says That Expectation, Built on ‘Harry Potter,’ Left Her Devastated on Later Sets

17 Sep 2026, 13:39 · Thought Catalog

Kevin Winter / Getty Images

Updated 4 minutes ago, September 17, 2026

Emma Watson grew up on the “Harry Potter” set surrounded by the same faces year after year, and she came to think of them as family. So when she moved on to later films, she carried that expectation with her — that the people she worked with would become a second family too. Instead she found colleagues who kept their distance, and it wrecked her.

Daniel Radcliffe, Rupert Grint, and Emma Watson, cast as Harry, Ron, and Hermione, in a Warner Bros. promotional photo released August 2000. Photo by Getty Images.

“I was coming to those sets with an expectation that I think I had developed on Harry Potter,” Watson said. “The people I worked with were going to be my family, and that we were going to be lifelong friends.”

Emma Watson, Rupert Grint, and Daniel Radcliffe together during production of ‘Harry Potter and the Prisoner of Azkaban’ in London, 2003. Photo by Murray Close / Moviepix via Getty Images.

Most of her castmates, it turned out, weren’t there for that. “Most people don’t come to those environments looking for friendships, they’re looking for, this is my chance, this is my role,” she said. “And I was not of that mindset. I found the rejection really painful.”

On the London set of ‘Harry Potter and the Order of the Phoenix’ (2006), Daniel Radcliffe, Rupert Grint, and Emma Watson appear together during filming. Photo by Murray Close / Moviepix via Getty Images.

She didn’t soften how far it went. Watson called it “bone-breakingly painful,” and said the experience “broke me.”

Emma Watson steps out of Hotel Excelsior in Venice on September 6, 2025, during the 82nd Venice International Film Festival. Photo by Pascal Le Segretain / Getty Images.

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