Insipid meets the other kind
Suzanne Moore wipes the Telegraph floor with Emma Watson.
Without JK Rowling, I doubt any of us would have heard of Emma Watson. If Rowling and her franchise hadn’t been such a behemoth, it would be also tough to care about the confused views of a 30-something former child star.
Without JK Rowling, Emma Watson, who played Hermione Grainger in the Harry Potter film series, would not be worth an estimated $85 million (£63 million) or still be considered worth interviewing, even though she has not acted since 2019.
It’s all but certain that without JKR Watson would be nowhere. Would she have landed a part in some other movie that made as much money and had as many passionate fans as the Harry Potter series? No, because there is no such other movie from the past quarter century.
Watson and her fellow Harry Potter actor, Daniel Radcliffe, both sheltered stars who speak out on matters beyond their intelligence, decided to turn on the woman who had made them.
Without digesting or comprehending a single sentence of Rowling’s deeply researched objections to the child mutilation of reassignment surgery, the harms of self-identification, the closing down of free speech or the dangers of housing vulnerable women with biological men, they decided not to think for themselves, but to follow the herd with their public pro-trans responses.
It was probably a matter not so much of deciding not to think for themselves as deciding they didn’t want to deal with endless yammering and bullying from people who wanted them to denounce JKR. I don’t know for a fact that there were such people yammering and bullying, but my long and nauseating experience of trans “activists” tells me there almost certainly were. They don’t let anyone even slightly famous get away with even the tiniest dissent from the ideology. It could well be that Watson and Radcliffe had to choose between Rowling and a pack of noisy bullies and they chose the noisy bullies. They chose to avoid the yammering and bullying by passing it on to Rowling, who had made them rich and famous. How sharper than a serpent’s tooth.
Watson’s latest “apology” – in an interview on Jay Shetty’s On Purpose podcast, Watson said she still “loves” and “treasures” Rowling – isn’t an apology.
It is neither fish nor fowl, with some psychobabble about holding space for Rowling in her heart. It is cognitive dissonance dissolved into meaningless platitudes. Watson’s expensive education clearly did not cover emotional intelligence.
Or avoidance of meaningless platitudes. That’s actually a really important thing to learn, because the more entangled in meaningless platitudes you are, the worse your thinking is and the less likely you are to treat other people decently. I should declare this a rule and name it after myself.
There really are two sides here, as Rowling once again demonstrates: one of kindness, imagination and principle, and one of faddishness, dogma and betrayal. One creates. One destroys. Watson stupidly chose the wrong one. Her spell is in tatters.
And the spell was never really hers to begin with. It was a loan from That Woman.
I’ve said before that of the three “Harry Potter” leads, Daniel Radcliffe was the only one to have a consistently successful post HP career.
He was in noteworthy films like “The Woman In Black”, “Kill Your Darlings”, “Trainwreck”, “Weird: The Al Yankovic Story”, plus had regular TV guest spots on hit shows like “Bojack Horseman”, and “Rick and Morty”, and also an acclaimed theatre role in “Equus”.
Whatever we may think of Radcliffe’s (IMO misguided) views on J. K. Rowling’s opinion on the trans issue, no fair-minded observer could deny that Radcliffe has a flourshing thespian career outside the walls of Hogwarts.
Emma Watson’s career, by contrast, has been patchy. Watson’s films “Colonia” and “Regression” were failures, and while she starred in the successful “Beauty and the Beast” remake, one felt that Any Young British Actress could have performed that role. Watson is probably better known, post HP, for her activitsm than her recent films.
Rupert Grint….what has he done since HP? Not much that’s notable.
I don’t have a link to this but Rowling shared a post by The Critic magazine about how Watson has been on the wrong end of El Jibitiqu’s online wrath since saying something nice about Rowling. JK added her own comment.
“El Jibitiqu” – applause.
Ouch! Right to the heart…
I don’t imagine that Radcliffe and Watson’s publicists would have helped either. The extent to which their own little tertiary gravy trains depended upon their clients’ continued bankablity would have likely inclined them against encouraging a principled stand, as it might have made Radson and Watcliffe too “controversial” for captured or trans activist boycott-averse studios to risk hiring.
Thus proving themselves to be the polar opposite of the fictional characters with whom their names are forever associated. While JK has consistently lived up to the values of the house of Gryffindoor, Watson, Radcliffe and Grint have all been revealed as Wormtail. In the Hogwarts universe Watson would be among the people wearing the “Potter Stinks” badges in The Goblet of Fire.
Sorry, I’m too stupid, or ignorant, El Jibitiqu?
Hint: Pay attention to the phonetics rather than the spelling. Does it sound like something familiar?
Athel, it’s LGBTQ in the style of a terrorist group.
Hah! El Jibitiqu ! I love it!
Radcliffe has had a good career since Harry Potter. He has appeared in five Broadway shows, received acclaim for his work in “How To Succeed In Business Without Really Trying”, and he won a Tony (best featured actor in a musical) for his role in “Merrily We Roll Along”. Certainly Harry Potter jumpstarted his career, but I think he’s a decent actor.
I liked Emma Watson in “Little Women”. She hasn’t had nearly the scope of career that Radcliffe has had, though.
Sackbut, we can acknowledge all of that, but there are thousands, maybe millions, of good, even great, actors out there who never get the chance to show us how good they are. There is no inevitability to their careers. They were fortunate to be the right age and the right type to fill the roles in Harry Potter, and get the chance so many others lacked.
So, yeah, they got their start because of Harry Potter. They might have gotten somewhere without it, but I guess we’ll never know, will we?
I also think El Jibitiqu is inspired because even if Emma Watson did make a poor decision regarding speaking out against JKR, it was all the TRAs pointing a finger at her and asking her to burn the witch, er, slag the TERF that brought pressure to bear on her to do so. My advice to celebrities – who aren’t celebrities because of being social justice warriors on social media – is to ignore it and keep your social media as anodyne as possible. Discretion is a chief Hogwarts virtue, or at least I think it should be.
Argh, correction to #11: “he won a Tony…”. Not “wanted”. Sorry.
Re #12: No disagreement, there are many who could have shined, given the opportunity. Many people who succeed in entertainment (or perhaps in business without really trying) do so with sufficient skill but extraordinary luck. I’m just disagreeing with the claim (from some) that Radcliffe is a terrible actor. He’s an award-winning actor. There are many other people who, given the chance, could have become award-winning actors, but there are also many less-capable actors who are unlikely ever to win awards, and he is not one of those.