@chriss_m: It being a “joke” is the way history is choosing to record it.
It was very clearly not a joke though.
Rowling never makes jokes like that,
and Lewis wrote “sorry jo” in response.

So if it was a joke,
it was extremely out of character,
and no one got it.
“I was only joking” is the go-to line for everyone caught saying something stupid.

@KahnArtizt: That's what I'm saying. Rowling created her white, then later said she was black.

@santinegrete: ah you're very welcome

I didn't expect to be giving a rant on this page, but I guess here we are.

I think the hypocrisy of Emma Watson's actions is more than enough incentive to take her words with a grain of salt. I feel like some of these emotions may have been retconned in after the fact as they don't sound much like a 14-year-old's thought processes. It's extremely common.
That being said, it doesn't mean everything she says is a lie. I very much sympathise with her situation during the filming if it was indeed true. And it seems very plausible. I'm sure it was a lonely experience, even if I don't necessarily see why it would be so much worse than for the other kids. Yeah she's a girl, but most of the boys are gentlemen, and didn't really get along either. Felton kept getting yelled at by young fans who thought he was actually evil, and Radcliffe kept getting harassed for having blue (not green) eyes, and for not having read the books. He alluded a few times to a lost childhood, but it never got any traction in media.

Watson's said many times that she's happily single, for example. The term she used was, “self-partnered” which made me cringe a little. But when I watched her body language in that interview, I didn't buy it for a second. I saw someone who was very clearly unhappily single. Or at least saw being single as the lesser of two evils. As soon as I heard it I got deranged flash backs of Gwyneth Paltrow and her non-divorce, i.e. the “conscious uncoupling”, just before she started peddling vagina eggs and orgasm candles and all sorts of scams as explicit substitutes for modern medicine which I can't for the life of me figure out the legality of. I hope the same thing doesn't happen to Emma. Or more likely what happened to the perfectly charming and talented Brie Larson, who got infected by toxic ideologies and consequently became repellent to all men in her life, and all life in general. (Check out her 2013 interview with Craig Ferguson if you want to see an almost unrecognisable version of her.)

I just want to know, if Watson was so lonely and uncomfortable with the whole fame thing, then why did she go out of her way to perpetuate it once the franchise was over? Yeah OK, if you're an actress, keep acting. But did she really need to sell pictures of her tits? In between promoting feminism at the UN? Was that some kind of bad joke or what? All the while her photoshoots were getting more and more sexual. And when presented with this conundrum by a reporter she responded, “It's just my tits; get over it.” I wonder if she lies awake at night wondering why Vanity Fair was willing to pay her hundreds of thousands of dollars for “just tits”.
She's said publicly that she has anxiety, and recurring thoughts of inadequacy. The sad thing about that for her, is that, she's right. She genuinely isn't good enough, and it's really not her fault. Which leads me back nicely to the genesis of all this: Rowling herself.

In my opinion it was only a few books into the series that Rowling let her fame go to her head. Around the time she started writing books with movies in mind. And there was just nothing on heaven or earth that was going to stop her getting her cash-out for the film revenue too.
Since then, she's milked the childhoods of an entire generation relentlessly for everything its worth. She sanctioned a mediocre play. Several terrible films birthed solely to hook American children into the IP. She fabricated a pronunciation of “Voldemort” despite instructing her actors to pronounce it differently. She lied about Hermione's race despite her own book contradicting her. She retroactively made Dumbledore gay. She encouraged Watson in taking off her clothes for money but publicly humiliated Matthew Lewis in front of the world for doing the same. She changed the character of Lavender Brown from black to white to ensure she got every drop of that sweet ticket money. She pandered a little too hard to the identity politics types, backtracked, and got eaten alive.

Needless to say whatever magic I felt as a kid upon reading Harry Potter is dead and buried now, seeing Rowling's absolutely wild exploitation of her admirers, and relentless bastardisation of her own art. After all these years, it's more nail than coffin at this point. But at some point she decided she needed to involve other people's lives too, beyond merely her own stories.
As Dave Chappelle said, the film industry is a monster, and these kids were walked right into its mouth at Rowling's direction, knowing from day zero that this was a “forever” thing (Watson's words) for all of them, bringing me back to my earlier point:

Rowling almost certainly had an expert or two come in to judge the faces and bone structures of her young would-be actors to ensure they would grow up physically attractive throughout the course of the films, then weighed the majority of the decision on that, almost regardless of their acting prowess. Grint was lucky enough to actually be a natural. Radcliffe was still pretty awful by the 8th film, but found his feet by the time Horns was in production. Watson though... she never really pulled it together. Her crying scene in Regression was as cringey as Radcliffe's in HP3, her delivery in The Bling Ring was some of the most awkward I've ever heard, and by Beauty and the Beast I was still sitting thinking I could do a more convincing Belle myself, and I'm a guy. Which should not(!) be the case after 20 years on the job. Acting was just never her calling.
And this may be why now she's seemingly more messed up emotionally than the others, and was more susceptible to predatory ideologies. Because she was lead to believe she was chosen, because she was the best actress out of alllll the little girls that showed up that month. Whereas in reality, she was chosen, again at Rowling's direction, primarily on the effect her potential post-puberty sex appeal would have on ticket sales, and I have no doubt that effect was huge.

I don't know about you guys, but I think that's a pretty brutal trick to play on a child, who by now has probably figured out that more than half her life has been a marketing ploy, and is now a full-grown adult stuck in a career she has no skill in or love for, is too famous to do anything else, is too beautiful and rich to find a good boyfriend, and is suspicious of all men anyway.
What a mess they made of her. I know I wouldn't trade my life for hers.
/rant

@zerojuice: When you proclaim that no one could be unhappy while rich,
it's an admission that you care about literally nothing but money.