Emma Watson may have played the brightest witch of her age, but behind the scenes of the Harry Potter films, she was navigating a very real-world struggle.
In a rare, vulnerable appearance on the Wednesday, Sept. episode of The Jay Shetty Podcast, the -year-old actress opened up about how her parents’ “painful” divorce when she was just five years old pushed her toward the world of acting.
“I’m pretty sure I was using acting as a way of escaping how painful my parents’ [divorce] was growing up,” Watson admitted during the viral sit-down.
The actress, who landed the iconic role of Hermione Granger at age nine, explained that the trauma wasn’t just the initial split between her parents, Chris Watson and Jacqueline Luesby, in . Instead, it was the “continuing situation” of balancing two completely different lives.
“It was just the continuing situation of living between two different houses and two different lives and two different sets of values,” she shared. “It made me a slightly serious child because I had that consciousness.”
Watson recalled the confusion of spending weekends with her father, noting that he had a “very different set of rules” than her mother. Because her parents held such different views, Emma felt she was left to navigate life’s big questions without a roadmap.
“No one gave me any easy answers,” she told Shetty. “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.”
The Little Women star, who was born in Paris before moving to England following the split, noted that this childhood “split” is exactly why she works so hard today to “remain whole” in her adult life.
Fans on TikTok and X (formerly Twitter) have been quick to praise Watson’s transparency, with many calling her reflections “relatable” and “deeply mature.”
However, Watson didn’t get through those whirlwind years alone. She credited her mother, Jacqueline, for being a “warrior” who fought for her to have a normal life while the rest of the world wanted her to be a full-time superstar.
“She fought tooth and nail,” Watson remembered. “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.’”
While Emma admitted she “didn’t really get it” at the time, she now realizes that her mother was her biggest advocate during the decade she spent filming the eight-movie franchise.
“I will forever be in her debt,” Watson said. “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.”
Would you like me to look into more of Emma Watson’s recent podcast revelations about her life away from the spotlight?
