Emma Watson Almost Left The Harry Potter Movies

Sounds like there’s a lot of revelations in HBO Max’s upcoming Harry Potter reunion special, Harry Potter 20th Anniversary: Return to Hogwarts.

According to People, director David Yates — who directed Harry Potter and the Order of the Phoenix — reveals that Emma Watson was considering walking away from the franchise entirely due to the pressures of rising fame.

Watson, for her part, discusses reading a diary entry from around that time where she felt especially isolated. “I think I was scared,” she tells co-star Rupert Grint. “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.’ … The fame thing had finally hit home in a big way.”

And Grint said that he felt similarly, too. “I had moments like that kind of all the way through,” he said. “I also had similar feelings to Emma kind of contemplating what life would be like if I called it a day, but we never really spoke about it.”

“I guess we were just kind of 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 having similar feelings.”

Harry Potter himself — Daniel Radcliffe, specifically — echoed Grint’s words about how the young cast hadn’t talked too much about how they were handling superstardom.

“We never talked about it on the film because we were all just kids,” he said. “As a 14-year-old boy, I was never going to turn around to another 14-year-old and be like, ‘Hey, how are you doing? Is everything okay?'”