‘Harry Potter’: Emma Watson Had to Move Into a Hotel After She Was Cast

When Emma Watson learned that the Harry Potter books were being adapted into films, she knew she was destined to play Hermione Granger. The actor shared a lot of personality traits with the witch and though she didn’t have any professional acting credits, she was determined to win the role. Fortunately, fate dealt her a lucky hand and the producers came to her school looking for children in her age range.

Emma Watson had an intense audition process to join the ‘Harry Potter’ cast

Watson was able to make a good first impression with the producers, and she was called in for a proper audition. But the road to landing the role was far from easy. Watson would go through eight rounds of auditions before she officially joined the Harry Potter cast. The odds were certainly stacked against her, but even her parents weren’t able to keep her realistic about her chances of snagging such a coveted role. She spent hours practicing her lines and waiting by the phone for good news.

“I ended up doing eight auditions to get my role,” the Harry Potter alum revealed in an interview with W Magazine. “I auditioned with maybe three or four different sets of Harrys. I would just literally like sit by the telephone and wait to get a phone call and sometimes it would be weeks. I learned then if you’re waiting for something to come it never comes. The phone call always came when I was out of the house. Always.”

Watson, Daniel Radcliffe, and Rupert Grint had to move into a hotel right after they were cast

Eventually, Watson got the news that she was hoping for. She was called into Harry Potter producer, David Heyman’s office and told that she was the chosen candidate for the role of Hermione. A little while later, she learned that Daniel Radcliffe and Rupert Grint had been cast as Harry Potter and Ron Weasley. Before long, the whole world knew, and the trio actually had to live in a hotel for a while until the media frenzy died down.

“Within about half an hour they’d taken a photograph of Dan, Rupert, and I which was then broadcast on the Internet that the three us had been cast,” Watson recalled. “We moved straight into a hotel. There were press outside our house. It was like this crazy whirlwind; like something from a movie.”

Watson rebelled against ‘Harry Potter’ fame by trying her best to be normal

Of course, the media obsession around the golden trio would only increase over time. Watson and her fellow castmates would spend 10 years filming and promoting Harry Potter movies. But despite the media’s obsession with her, Watson managed to find some threads of normalcy. She doesn’t travel with a bodyguard, she took public transportation until she was 18, and she even attended Brown University and roomed with a girl she’d never met.

According to Watson, fighting for normalcy helped her cope with the immense fame that Harry Potter brought her. “That was my rebellion, in a funny way, was my insistence to be normal and do normal things,” she explained. “Every day was a new day and I just had to see how it went.”