Tom Felton, who plays Draco Malfoy, recently recounted making fun of Emma Watson when filming Harry Potter and the Sorcerer’s Stone.
The Harry Potter film series, which has eight installments, was initially based on the enormously well-liked fantasy books by author J.K. Rowling. It also gave rise to three Fantastic Beasts spinoff movies. The franchise is the fourth-highest film series ever with nearly $7.7 billion in box office earnings.
A large portion of the cast was made out of young actors with few to no credits because the original books’ main characters were schoolchildren. The character of Draco, a spoilt, cunning bully who represented the Slytherin House at the Hogwarts School of Witchcraft and Wizardry, was played by Felton when he was 12 years old. He portrayed the antagonist to the series’ three main characters: Hermione Granger, a brutally honest know-it-all, and the prophesied Harry Potter (Daniel Radcliffe) (Emma Watson).
On the set of Harry Potter and the Sorcerer’s Stone, Felton once taunted Watson, as he described in his new memoir, Beyond the Wand: The Magic and Mayhem of Growing Up a Wizard (via Insider). He acknowledged that the kids at that time were divided into their Hogwarts house characters at the moment. The parties kept their distance, according to Felton, but “weren’t hostile to each other by any means.” However, during the presentation, Felton and his buddies made fun of 9-year-old Watson as she danced for the cast. Here is what the actor wrote:
“I suppose we thought we were a bit cooler. We’d spend our free time together listening to rap music — Wu-Tang, Biggie, 2Pac — so when word reached Josh and me that 9-year-old Emma had put together a little dance show in her dressing room that she wanted to present to us at lunchtime, we were predictably dismissive.”
“We sniggered our way down to Emma’s show, and the sniggers grew louder as she danced. We were just being shitty boys, largely out of awkwardness and because we thought taking the piss was cool, but Emma was visibly upset by our thoughtless reaction. I did feel like a bit of a dick, and rightly so.”
“I did apologize and Emma accepted my apology. Everybody moved on. It was just a stupid, teenage act of thoughtlessness, the sort of thing that happens every day. So why does that moment stick in my memory? Why is it so painful for me to recall?”
The Harry Potter Cast Were Actually Very Close, Despite the Jokes
Hermine from Harry Potter Sorcerers Stone by Ron
Felton and Watson reconciled, but the actor says he still feels bad about what happened and is “ashamed by the memories” of his actions. Given that Watson was the only girl in the primary cast and was therefore surrounded by boys and their “boy humor,” he concedes that she was already under more strain than the other cast members. But as the movie series gained enormous fame, the core cast grew close and kept in touch even after the Harry Potter films were over.