What is the point of Emma Watson?

Spectator

18-07-2025

I've been musing recently how people in the public eye can go 'downhill' in two main ways. One can make big, brash, 'bad' decisions, ignore well-meaning advice and render oneself an outlaw well into old age, unacceptable in polite company and rejected by one's more pusillanimous peers.
There's a kind of tattered glory in this, knowing that you didn't toe the line (you were too busy snorting them) because you had talent to burn. Even if you do eventually find yourself on the ropes, you'll always have the satisfaction of knowing that you inspired a whole bunch of youngsters and were remembered by a whole bunch of oldsters – something which line-toers are highly unlikely to do.
Or you can get lucky big time, on a bit of fluke fortune, and spend the rest of your career toeing the exact line that the bold minority have turned their back on. But eventually someone will say 'X hasn't done much recently!' – and all those years of bowing to convention will count as nothing as other people in your profession, but without your head-start, overtake you. And then you might think: 'Sod it – I'm going to take a risk because I'm worth it!'
And then you get pulled over on a speeding charge.
Of all the showbiz has-beens this has happened to, the report this week that the ray of sunshine Emma Watson was in hot water filled me with glee. The Harry Potter actress – who played Hermione Granger in the films – was banned from driving for six months, after she was caught speeding. Watson – who already had nine points on her licence – was collared for driving her Audi at 38mph in a 30mph zone in Oxford last year. The 35-year-old, now – still! – a student, was made to pay a total of £1,044 at High Wycombe Magistrates' Court on Wednesday. Her lawyer told the court: 'She is in a position to pay the fine.'
The last line may be the understatement of the century. Watson is thought to have a net worth of around £65 million, most of which one imagines was garnered from the decade between 2001 and 2011, when she was busy pretending to be a witch.
In the years since, Watson has been busy – not least earning her status as a high-ranking Transmaid who, alongside the child 'stars' who played her wizard pals Harry and Ron Weasley, attempted to throw JK Rowling under the bus (folly, as she's made of titanium). One wonders if Watson missed a trick in court this week by not deploying her views on gender – that 'trans people are who they say they are' – to shape her defence. Did it cross her mind to put in a plea that she identifies as someone who doesn't drive badly?
Still, I suppose that her dirty driving licence tells its own tale, like the time her Audi was towed away last year in Stratford-upon-Avon after she blocked a car park and ignored a 'no parking' sign to visit a pub.
Watson is just the latest example of 'the Wokescreen' – a dichotomy which occurs when famous people who identify as Good do Naughty Things but, one feels, expect to be let off as they've proved how wonderful they are by mouthing the liberal establishment truisms about everything from trans to Trump.
Thus Watson can serve as a UN Women Goodwill Ambassador while taking a pop at Rowling – the woman who ultimately she should be thanking for bringing her fame and fortune.
Rowling must have enjoyed responding to Bungle (Emma Watson), Zippy (Daniel Radcliffe) and George (Rupert Grint) last year after the publication of the Cass review, which called into question the trans orthodoxy and medical intervention on matters of gender. One social media wag replied to Rowling after the report was published to say: 'Just waiting for Dan and Emma to give you a very public apology… safe in the knowledge that you will forgive them…'
'Not safe, I'm afraid,' replied Rowling.
How typical that Watson was the public face of the embarrassingly-named 'HeForShe' movement, which seeks to promote gender equality but, to me, appears to centre men at the core of feminism. Haven't we had enough of that?
Watson is also the environmental 'activist' who launched a fashion line with Alberta Ferretti, whose dresses cost thousands of pounds; the teetotaller who launched a gin line where bottles go for £40; and the feminist 'role model' who poses in revealing outfits on magazine front covers.
It's handy that Watson had all these irons in the fire, as since she finished the Potter films, her acting has hardly set the world on fire. She featured in Beauty and the Beast, The Bling Ring and The Perks of Being a Wallflower; her last role was in the 2019 remake of Little Women.
To be fair, she felt the need to return to her studies. Perhaps she figured out that a woman like her with a sky-high IQ owed it to the world to share her wisdom and her words, which were certainly of more worth than those state-schooled idiots who got lucky writing about boy wizards. Like many a thespian these days, Watson is from a wealthy background; a scion of the private prep Dragon School in Oxford (fees £28,000 a year) which coincidentally 'blessed' us with all the male leads in BBC One's 2016 smash The Night Manager – Hugh Laurie, Tom Hiddleston and Tom Hollander.
Now much older, if not necessarily wiser (nine points on that licence, remember!), Watson is back in Oxford studying for a master's degree in creative writing. This year, she announced that she'd be sticking around for a PhD. Joy!
I'd love to see some of Watson's writing – and I say that in a caring way – because she has always struck me as one of those clunkers who, for their own good and our own sanity, should be dissuaded from speaking unless reading from a script. I can't imagine what she'd sound like reading from a script of her own; it really does sound like the thespian equivalent of some kind of End Of Days portent.
On the other hand, I doubt that Watson could ever return to acting. The striking thing about the Harry Potter movies is how uniformly bad the acting of the lead children was in contrast to how good the adult actors were. This is odd as child actors usually steal every scene. Yet I've seen totem poles less wooden than Watson and Radcliffe.
There are some little girls who really do go through life hamming it up like terrible actors; it's clear from the books that Hermione Grainger was one of them. In the first couple of films, it's genuinely impossible to tell whether Watson is giving a pitch-perfect performance as a girl who acts like she can't act, or whether she just can't act; it was only her failure to grow out of it that gave the game away.
You can see that some child stars, from Judy Garland to Lindsay Lohan, were natural stand-outs from the start. But look at the young Radcliffe and Watson and tell me with a straight face that they had STAR QUALITY stamped on them; I've seen pairs of twice-used teabags with more charisma. Is it perhaps partly the knowledge of how purely lucky they were which causes these repeated jibes at the woman who made their lovely lives possible?
The next decade won't be an easy one for Watson; the new HBO adaptation of the Harry Potter books is currently in production, featuring 11-year-old Arabella Stanton as Hermione. Though I can't comment on her acting skills, photographs show a child who appears to have what it's hard not to call 'star quality', in contrast with the rather dull look Watson had even when young.
It's a fact of life that many established actresses (and actors) are not the best at their alleged craft, but they usually have some redeeming feature, such as being very good-looking or notoriously witty on chat shows; Watson has none.
You probably won't have heard of Geraldine Dvorak, but she was Garbo's stand-in, once described as having 'whatever it is Garbo has except that one thing Garbo has.' That's what I think of when I see Watson; she'd have made a really good stand-in. Instead, promoted far above her abilities thanks to a kind woman who gave her the benefit of the doubt, I think it's fair to say that we will remember Emma Watson as someone who was a very bad driver – and a very bad judge of her own abilities, whether behind the wheel of a car, or a career.