Tom, who portrayed Draco Malfoy, details his feelings for the Hermione Granger actor in his new memoir, Beyond the Wand, writing that he “always had a secret love for Emma, though not perhaps in the way that people might want to hear.”
“That isn’t to say that there’s never been a spark between us,” though, he added. “There most definitely has, only at different times.”
Felton said he was 15 when he first found out that Emma, then 12, liked him, but he had a girlfriend at the time.
“Rumours started to abound that there was more to our relationship than we were letting on,” he continued. “I denied that I liked her in that way, but the truth was different. My girlfriend at the time knew straight away that there was something unspoken between us. I remember using the familiar old line, ‘I love her like a sister.’ But there was more to it than that.”
Still, looking back, he doesn’t think he was actually “ever in love with Emma.” But he said he’d “loved and admired her as a person in a way that I could never explain to anybody else. We were kindred spirits.”
Emma hasn’t commented on any of this so far, but she’s noted before how she always had a crush on Tom. “He totally knew [I was crushing on him],” she once told Jonathan Ross, adding how Tom would always say he never saw her in that way.
“The thing is that he’d tell everyone, ‘I see her in a younger, sisterly way.’ And it just broke my heart. It still does.”
It’s unfortunate that they could never make it work, but on the bright side, at least they managed to stay friends. If you want to read more from the book, you can preorder it here.
Source: https://www.buzzfeed.com/chelseastewart/tom-felton-relationship-emma-watson-book