The Harry Potter movie franchise is celebrating its 20th anniversary in a number of ways, but none bigger than the upcoming HBO Max special Harry Potter 20th Anniversary: Return to Hogwarts, which sees a who’s who of the Potter movies appearing for a one off reunion to reminisce about the making of the movie series and some of the stories that come with it. During the reunion, which is now available on HBO Max, Emma Watson acknowledges and speaks about how she once planned on leaving the franchise and walking away from the role of Hermione before the conclusion of the saga.
Harry Potter and the Order of the Phoenix director David Yates is seen in the reunion mentioning how Watson almost made the decision to quit her role in what could have been one of the biggest choices in her career, and Watson explains herself that it came at a time in her life that she was feeling lonely.
“I think I was scared. I don’t know if you ever felt like it got to a tipping point where you were like, “This is kind of forever now,”‘ Watson said. “It was around the time of Order of the Phoenix when things started getting spicy for all of us. The fame thing had finally hit home – in a big way. No-one had to convince me to see it through. The fans genuinely wanted me to succeed, and they all genuinely have each other’s backs. How great is that?”
From the discussion that follows, it seems that Watson wasn’t the only one who had a wobble about her Harry Potter future around the time the fifth movie in the franchise, as Rupert Grint also revealed that he had similar feelings even though the pair never discussed or even mentioned each other’s thoughts at the time. “I also had sort of similar feelings to Emma, contemplating what life would be like if I called it a day,” Grint says. “We never really spoke about it. I guess we were just going through it at our own pace, we were kind of in the moment at the time. It just didn’t really occur to us that we were all probably kind of having similar feelings.”
For a while in the lead up to the 20th anniversary, Harry Potter fans believed they were not going to get any kind of reunion, with Daniel Radcliffe and others saying it was unlikely that they would be taking part in any “big get together” only a month before the big announcement of the Return to Hogwarts special was made. When it comes to scale, this reunion special is substantially larger than the Friends reunion which premiered earlier in the year, with appearances by Helena Bonham Carter, Robbie Coltrane, Ralph Fiennes, Jason Isaacs, Gary Oldman, Tom Felton, James Phelps, Oliver Phelps, Mark Williams, Bonnie Wright, Alfred Enoch, Matthew Lewis, and Evanna Lynch, director Chris Columbus and more all turning out for the occasion. One person notably absent from proceedings is Harry Potter creator J.K. Rowling, who is only seen in archive footage, whose omission has not been explained by Warner Bros. but has been called out as a little odd by some critics.
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