16

DRAMIONE

or

THE CHICKEN AND THE DUCK

Let me take you forward a few years to Santa Monica, Los Angeles.

Harry Potter is in my past. I’m living here in Venice Beach and in many ways it’s the worst possible place for a person with any kind of public profile. Tens of thousands of tourists descend on the place every day, and Americans are not known for their shyness when it comes to approaching people they recognise. Somehow, though, I get away with it. Maybe it’s because I spend most of my time in the same pair of wet swimming shorts I’ve been in all week, sporting a backwards baseball hat, skating beside the pier. Even if somebody does recognise me, they’ll likely shake their heads and think, That can’t be Draco, he looks too much like a beach bum.

But there’s celebrity, and then there’s celebrity. As I’m reminded when Emma Watson comes to hang out.

I suggest we go out for the day. It sounds like a small thing, right? Just a day hanging out on the beach with an old friend. But it’s not a small thing for Emma. I’m not sure it’s something that Emma would ever really do without some encouragement. And you can see why, the moment you step out of the door. I’m wearing a T-shirt that says “Women Do It Better,” much to Emma’s approval. She wears sporting joggers and a T-shirt, a world away from the red-carpet Emma that everyone knows. Still, the very first person we see turns her head in recognition. Emma still looks almost exactly how she did when we finished filming the Potter films. She certainly doesn’t look like a beach bum. Looks like our chances of travelling incognito are zero.

Holding on to each other, we ride my electric longboard along the boardwalk. A Mexican wave of faces turns as we pass. At first people are astonished. Then they’re excited. They shout Emma’s name. They shout Hermione’s name. Eventually they start to chase us along the boardwalk. We head to Big Dean’s for a pint. I’m a regular here. Pretty much all the staff are friends of mine. But suddenly it’s like they’ve never seen me before. All eyes are on Emma. One of the staff even approaches her with a CD of his music in the hope that, as a “famous person,” she can pass it on to someone influential.

Emma takes it all in her stride. She’s had this kind of reaction since she was a teen. I was able to live something of a normal life alongside my Hogwarts career, but for Emma that was near impossible. She’s had to learn how to deal with it. We leave the bar and head back along the beach, where we hide under an old lifeguard stand, two on-screen enemies now closer than ever, taking respite from the constant glare of public attention. As we sit there we think back over the years to a time when life was different, when Emma was not nearly so comfortable being the centre of attention and I was not nearly so attentive as a friend.

My relationship with Emma Watson did not start well. First off, there was my cold retort at the first Potter audition, when I gave a frizzy-haired nine-year-old both barrels of my on-set world-weariness. She’d have been forgiven for not wanting much to do with me.

It got worse.

There was a definite Gryffindor/Slytherin divide in the early days. Two cliques that kept their distance from each other, largely because we didn’t spend that much time working together. Daniel, Emma and Rupert were one clique. Jamie, Josh and I were the other. We weren’t unfriendly to each other by any means, but we were just different somehow. The main three were squeaky clean. We weren’t. The main three came from well-educated backgrounds. Sure, I hardly had a rough life, but there was a definite difference to our respective upbringings. I suppose we thought we were a bit cooler. We’d spend our free time together listening to rap music—Wu-Tang, Biggie, 2Pac—so when word reached Josh and me that nine-year-old Emma had put together a little dance show in her dressing room that she wanted to present to us at lunchtime, we were predictably dismissive. Going to a dance show over arguing which rap style was best, East Coast or West Coast? Weak, bruv.

We sniggered our way down to Emma’s show, and the sniggers grew louder as she danced. We were just being shitty boys, largely out of awkwardness and because we thought taking the piss was cool, but Emma was visibly upset by our thoughtless reaction. I did feel like a bit of a dick, and rightly so. In the end, though, it was up to one of the hair and make-up ladies to tell me what was what. “She’s very upset,” she said. “You shouldn’t have laughed at her. You need to apologise.”

I did apologise and Emma accepted my apology. Everybody moved on. It was just a stupid, teenage act of thoughtlessness, the sort of thing that happens every day. So why does that moment stick in my memory? Why is it so painful for me to recall?

The answer, I think, is that I’ve grown to understand with the passing of the years that of all of us, Emma had the most to deal with, the most difficult situation to negotiate, and from the earliest age. She would become one of the most famous women in the world—and to my mind one of the most impressive—but it’s easy for an outsider to see only the celebrity, and not take a moment to consider the challenges that come with it. At the start, Emma wasn’t thirteen like me, or eleven like Daniel. She was nine. There’s a big difference. She’d never been on a film set before, and out of the lead child roles she was the only girl. She was surrounded by “boy humour”—silly practical jokes and pre-pubescent laddishness—and while she more than held her own in that respect, and could even be cheekier than the rest of us put together, it can’t have been easy. And the pressures she experienced went further than just having to deal with stupid boys. Emma was never afforded a normal childhood. She was in many ways treated like an adult from the day she was cast. It’s a phenomenon that can, I think, be more difficult for girls than for boys. They are unfairly sexualised in the media and beyond. They are judged on their appearance, and any hint of assertiveness raises an eyebrow that wouldn’t happen if it came from a guy. I wonder what would have happened if somebody had the ability to look into the future and tell the nine-year-old Emma what it held. That this thing she’d signed up for would be with her for the rest of her life. That she would never be able to get away from it. That she would be hounded forever. Would she still have done it? Maybe. But maybe not.

So the last thing she needed, in an environment that should have been—and normally was—safe and friendly and familial, was Josh and me laughing at her dance. That’s why I feel ashamed by the memory of our behaviour. And that’s why I’m glad that our friendship did not founder on the rocks of my insensitivity, but became something deeper. A touchstone for both of our lives.

I’ve always had a secret love for Emma, though not perhaps in the way that people might want to hear. That isn’t to say there’s never been a spark between us. There most definitely has, only at different times. A lady called Lisa Tomblin was in charge of hair on the later Potter films. I’d known her from the age of seven, when we’d worked together on Anna and the King, and it was she who first told me that Emma had a crush on me. She was twelve, I was fifteen. I had a girlfriend, and in any case, I’d been programmed to dismiss any talk of that kind of stuff. I laughed it off. In fact, I don’t think I really believed her.

But time passed and things changed. We grew closer and the more I saw and understood what her life was like, the more empathy I had for her. I became very defensive of her, whenever she needed defending. I began to see her not as a little girl, nor as a public-property celebrity, but as a young woman who was doing her very best to negotiate a life where ordinary social situations and interactions were practically impossible. Occasionally, she could have a cutting tongue. From time to time she could be dismissive or apparently unfriendly. Some people took that the wrong way. They failed to understand the pressures of being Hermione, or even that Emma was allowed her off days just as everyone is.

Most of the time in those early days, though, if Emma seemed unforthcoming it was not because she was having an off day, but for more complex reasons. When we were filming Prisoner of Azkaban, we found ourselves in the middle of a forest in Virginia Water to shoot the scene where Buckbeak the Hippogriff attacks Draco. There were maybe fifty members of the cast and crew, including Daniel, Emma and Rupert, along with Robbie Coltrane and, of course, Buckbeak himself. It’s not easy, when you’re filming with that number of people, to keep under the radar. And since this was a public place we soon attracted the attention of some fans. Emma’s instinctive reaction was to look away, to avoid eye contact and keep her distance while strangers shouted her name. It no doubt looked like standoffishness, like she couldn’t be bothered to sign an autograph or interact with onlookers. The truth was, she was a twelve-year-old girl and she was terrified. I don’t think she fully understood why everybody was so interested in her. It was hardly surprising, since we had little preparation from the studio about how to deal with such situations.

But I had a few more years under my belt and was a good deal less worried about interaction with the public. I took Emma to one side and tried to help her see that there was no reason to feel threatened, that it was perfectly fine to be friendly, that we had it in our gift to create a memorable moment for the fans who wanted to talk to us. Together we walked over and chatted to them, and I could see a weight lift from Emma’s shoulders. Perhaps it went some way to making up for my thoughtlessness at laughing at her dance routine. Certainly David Heyman later told me that was one of the moments he saw I was growing up from an arrogant kid to a more thoughtful young adult. And I believe that it helped Emma come to terms just a little with the strangeness of the life she found herself living. In a way, we both helped each other grow somewhat that day.

Rumours started to abound that there was more to our relationship than we were letting on. I denied that I liked her in that way, but the truth was different. My girlfriend at the time knew straightaway that there was something unspoken between us. I remember using the familiar old line: “I love her like a sister.” But there was more to it than that. I don’t think I was ever in love with Emma, but I loved and admired her as a person in a way that I could never explain to anybody else.

One time we met up outside of Hogwarts—something that I rarely did with anybody else from the cast or crew, because I preferred to return to the ordinariness of my day-to-day life. I picked her up and we went for a long walk round a lake close to my home. Emma spent a good deal of time reprimanding me for smoking, then she suddenly told me something that will always remain with me. “I’ve always known I was a duck,” she said, “but I’ve spent my whole life being told I was a chicken. Every time I try to say ‘quack’ the world tells me that I have to say ‘cluck.’ I even started believing that I was a chicken and not a duck. Then we started hanging out and I found somebody else who quacked. And that’s when I thought: To hell with them, I really am a duck!”

Did I mention that Emma Watson has a way with words?

To anybody else, Emma’s story about the chicken and the duck might have sounded like gobbledegook. Not to me. I understood exactly what she meant. She meant that we were kindred spirits, that we understood each other and that we helped each other make sense of ourselves and of our lives. We’ve been quacking ever since. I know for certain that I’ll always have Emma’s back, and that she’ll have mine too.

And trust me, Emma’s a good person to have looking out for you, not least because she has a mean right hook, as I found out to my detriment one day.

We were filming Chamber of Secrets when the Prisoner of Azkaban book came out. True to form I was one of the very last members of the cast to read it, but word reached me that it included a scene in which Hermione gives Draco a well-deserved slap in the face. Cool, this should be fun! I was very into my Jackie Chan films at the time, and was stoked to learn that Emma and I might have to indulge in some on-screen violence when we shot the next film the following year. So as soon as I heard this, Josh and I went to find her so we could practise our stage-fighting. There was a holding tent just off set—a bit like a wedding marquee. This was where we kids could hang out when we didn’t have to be on set or in tutoring. To start with it was amply stocked with chocolate, crisps, Coca-Cola and—believe it or not—Red Bull, which I mischievously encouraged the younger kids to indulge in. It was free, after all. That soon changed when the mum of Matthew Lewis, who played Neville Longbottom, made the not unreasonable observation that me feeding unlimited chocolate and energy drinks to nine-year-olds was not the best idea in the history of ideas. Once again, my reputation with the chaperones was consolidated. The snacks, to our disappointment, morphed into fresh fruit and water and the holding tent became a tad less inviting. But it did have a ping-pong table and Emma, being a mean ping-pong player, was often to be found there.

Josh and I burst into the holding tent. Sure enough, Emma was hanging out there with another girl playing ping-pong. My imagination was sparked by the thought of enacting the perfect Jackie Chan stage slap, where the cameras are perfectly lined up from behind me to make it look as if her palm has made solid contact with my face, and I really sell it on screen even though Emma hasn’t even touched me. Not even close. So I approached with an abundance of enthusiasm.

I didn’t have the cojones to tell Emma that I hadn’t meant her to thwack me in the face, or that she nearly had me in tears. She didn’t find that out till much later on. And when, the following year, we came to filming that scene, you can imagine my hesitation when they told me the slap had been rewritten into a punch. I pleaded with Emma to make very sure she was keeping her distance for our stage punch. I don’t mind admitting that my cheek twinged at the memory of Emma Watson’s previous right hook.

Emma has taught me so many valuable lessons over the years, most importantly: don’t always follow the herd, never underestimate the power of a woman and, whatever you do, keep quacking.