“It’s funny,” Watson says about winning the role, “because it happened to me when I was so young. You barely notice yourself growing up when it’s happening, but I guess that’s what has happened, really.”

“It’s very peculiar looking back on [the films] and seeing how much I’ve changed and how much I’ve grown and what I looked like before all this happened,” Watson says. She evens jokes that, in those first movies, she looked “like a chipmunk” with her baby face. Then she started maturing, along with Radcliffe and Grint. “In a way, that’s what people really identify with. It makes it a real journey, a very real journey, because we literally are growing up with the characters.”

“I think Hermione has a massive part to play in Harry’s success,” says Watson. “She teaches him that the only way to defeat Voldemort is through having his friends, and trusting his friends.”

“For such mainstream entertainment, it has such depth. It is very complex and I think that is why I wouldn’t just call it a kids’ book,” says Watson.

“Everything about the book, everything about J.K. Rowling’s world, is thought down to the very last detail. You can pull apart the spells and they’re Latin and they actually mean what they are doing. And all the names are so interesting and so unique and different and everyone has their own history. And how she’s come up with all of this is just so amazing. At the end of each book, it’s almost like an Aesop’s Fable. Every time, every year, there is a lesson that Harry learns.”

“Having an experience outside of Harry Potter really helped me,” Watson says. “I think it really convinced me that this is where I belong and this is what I am meant to be doing, that I do want to be an actress. But I think I needed to have an experience outside of Harry Potter because, in a way, I was just plucked from obscurity and given this role. I mean, I really wanted it but I never felt that it was a decision I made. It just happened to me. I felt I won the lottery.”