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Emma Watson is sharing how her parents’ divorce affected her approach to her acting career as a child in the Harry Potter movies.
Watson, 35, appeared on the Wednesday, Sept. 24 episode of The Jay Shetty Podcast for a rare interview, during which the actress shared that she is “pretty sure I was using acting as a way of escaping how painful my parents’ [divorce]” was growing up.
Her parents, Chris Watson and Jacqueline Luesby, divorced in 1995, when Emma was just 5 years old; she landed her iconic role as Hermione Granger in the Potter franchise at 9.
“It wasn’t just the divorce, it was just the continuing situation of living between two different houses and two different lives and two different sets of values,” Watson said. “As a child, being aware of ‘Hmm, we don’t quite have the support we need here for this, we’re not quite, like…’ It made me a slightly serious child because I had that consciousness. And then when I would go and spend the weekend with my dad, it was a very different set of rules and very different situation.”
Watson said that she realized in the years after her parents’ divorce that both Chris and Luesby had “very different views on different things,” though she did not get into specifics.
“The hard part of that was that no one gave me any easy answers. It meant I had to form all of my own opinions myself because there was no consensus, and it made me a critical thinker, for sure,” she said. “And so that was amazing and also really like ‘Gosh, okay, I need to decide what I think is important in life and what my opinions are. No one’s handing me this.’ Maybe it also made me aware of not wanting to be so split and why it’s been important to me to try to remain whole in all the different circumstances of my life and ask myself questions of how I can do that best, because I think I experienced as a child that the split is painful.”
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Emma was born in Paris in 1990; her parents welcomed her brother Alex Watson, now 32, in 1992, and the family lived in Paris until Chris and Jacqueline’s 1995 divorce. Following her parents’ split, the family moved back to England.
Elsewhere during Emma’s appearance on the podcsat, she highlighted how her mother Jacqueline fought for her to retain a sense of normalcy while she grew up as she filmed the eight Harry Potter movies, which released between 2001 and 2011.
“She was like a warrior for my normalcy and for me having an ordinary life and going to school and no one wanted that,” she said. “It would have been considerably easier if I had not continued going to school. But she — wow, I will forever be in her debt. She somehow knew that me feeling part of the ordinary world and feeling I had a place in it and that I belonged outside of those films was going to be crucial.”
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As Emma reflected on Jacqueline’s role in her childhood during the duration of the Potter series, she noted that her mother “basically didn’t have anyone on her team” in fighting to keep Emma’s life as normal as possible.
“She fought tooth and nail, she was on the phone for hours, saying, ‘She has to sit her exams. She has to go back. She needs to be here. She needs to have some parts of a normal childhood.’ And yeah, forever in her debt,” Emma added. “To be honest, I didn’t really get it. I was like ‘Okay. I guess it’s important.’ I didn’t really get it. So yeah, she was amazing.”
