Prepare to be expelliarmed.
Emma Watson is celebrating her 30th birthday, and if that isn't some time trickery right there, we don't know what sort of dark arts are afoot.
The English actress, activist and style maven has expanded on her thespian skill set in recent years, but of course she remains best known for the iconic role of Hermione Granger in the Harry Potter movies—which kicked off with Harry Potter and the Sorcerer's Stone in November 2001, when Watson was only 11 and…
Well, count the things in the world that were different.
Simply enough, the lives of Watson and her fellow young costars would never be the same, that was for sure.
Asked in 2007 what she would one day tell people when they asked what making the Harry Potter films was like, after all was said and done, a teenage Watson told Scholastic that her response would be "what an amazing experience it was, how much it changed my life, and how much I learned from it."
Of course, once she grew up, balancing global fame and the expectations that come with people thinking they know you with having an actual life became a bit more complicated.
"It's one of the things that I struggle with, because the three of us—Dan, Rupert and I—were kids when we got cast in this fairy-tale series, and what happened to us was kind of a fantasy story in itself," Watson told Jessica Chastain in a chat for Interview magazine in 2017 that apparently took place while Watson was in her bathtub. "Outside of the movies. So the story of my life has been of public interest, which is why I've been so passionate about having a private identity."
Watson would be first to say she's come a long way since bursting onto the scene as the most clever little wizard at Hogwarts, so in her honor we're shedding a little lumos on what Dan, Rupert and the rest of the tender-aged cast of the blockbuster series are up to now:
The boy who played Harry Potter is ever grateful for the role that knocked down all the doors for him, but he's also been busy scrubbing any child-star residue from his acting image, starting with his raw, nudity-requiring Broadway debut in Equus in 2007. He followed that up with the more chipper How to Succeed in Business Without Really Trying in 2011. For years he has alternated between theater (The Cripple of Inishmaan, Rosencrantz and Gildenstern Are Dead) and film (The Woman in Black, Victor Frankenstein), leaning heavily into the dramatic and/or the absurd.
To be sure, if there's some dark humor to be found, Radcliffe is into it, whether on TV playing a morphine-addicted physician in A Young Doctor's Notebook or a low-level angel trying to prevent God from ending the world in Miracle Workers—or playing a flatulent corpse in 2016's Swiss Army Man. He was starring in Samuel Beckett's Endgame at the Old Vic in London when live theater and everything else was shut down due to the coronavirus pandemic. Since then, he played the villain opposite Sandra Bullock and Channing Tatum in their 2022 rom-com The Lost City and portrayed musician "Weird Al" Yankovic in Weird: The Al Yankovic Story, a biographical parody film for The Roku Channel.
Sober since 2010, Radcliffe has also been open about drinking to excess back when the Harry Potter franchise was nearing its finish and, already more famous than he ever dreamed, he was anxious about his next step in life.
"In my case, the quickest way to forget about the fact that you're being watched is to get very drunk," he said on Off Camera With Sam Jones in 2019.
"And then as you get very drunk, you become aware that, 'Oh, people are watching more now because now I'm getting very drunk, so I should probably drink more to ignore that more.'"
Radcliffe has been in a relationship with actress Erin Darke since meeting her on the set of 2013's Kill Your Darlings, in which he played "Howl" poet Alan Ginsberg. In March, a rep for Radcliffe confirmed to E! News that the couple is expecting their first child.
The Paris-born and Oxfordshire-raised kid had no more than a few school plays on her resume when she was cast as Hermione Granger, her first professional acting job. After completing the seven films, Watson split her time between college at Brown University (she graduated in 2014 with a degree in English literature) and starring in indie movies such as The Perks of Being a Wallflower and The Bling Ring. The latter of which saw her breaking out of her rule-abiding Hermione shell as part of a band of privileged but maladjusted young thieves who start stealing clothes, jewelry and cash from celebrity homes.
While modeling for the likes of Burberry and Lancôme, Watson played Belle in the hit 2017 live-action remake of Beauty and the Beast and in 2019 was the more traditionally minded eldest March sister, Meg, in Greta Gerwig's Little Women. She has also become an activist focused on gender inequality, launching the HeForShe campaign as a UN Women Goodwill Ambassador in 2014 and remaining an outspoken advocate for parity in the film industry and beyond.
Past boyfriends have included Will Adamowicz, Matthew Janney, William "Mack" Knight and Leo Robinson, but these days she's happily coupled with Brandon Green. In May 2021, Watson addressed reports about her possible retirement from acting, tweeting, "Rumours about whether my career is 'dormant or not' are ways to create clicks each time they are revealed to be true or untrue."
It was as if the redhead from Essex sprang from the earth ready to play Harry's best mate, Ron Weasley. Grint—whose first big post-Potter honor was being part of the Olympic Torch relay before the London Olympics in 2012, an "amazing" experience he said he'd cherish forever— has acted primarily in British productions. Most notably he starred in The ABC Murders on BBC One, based on the Agatha Christie mystery, and the Sky One dark comedy Sick Note, playing an average Joe whose life perks up after he's given a false-alarm cancer diagnosis but decides to let everyone continue to believe he's still sick. (Lindsay Lohan was among his co-stars.) His movies have included CBGB, about the famed punk-rock club in New York, and the French comedy Moonwalkers. He currently stars on Apple TV+ in Servant, M. Night Shyamalan's supernatural mystery series, which returned for a second season, and appeared in the writer and director's horror film Knock at the Cabin.
"From the moment I got the part [of Ron], my life completely changed," Grint told Radio Times in 2018. "It was a weird time and it has taken me a long while to process. Just being invisible can still be difficult. Sometimes you just want to go to B&Q."
He also said, "After Potter I didn't really know what I wanted to do. I had this feeling that I had missed out on normal things. I lost touch with a lot of my friends from school. I wanted to have a bit of a life again, so I took a break. I've never really been super-ambitious. I think there's always been something in me, particularly when I finished Potter, that wants to prove myself, but I'm also naturally quite an insecure person anyway."
Whatever he was doing worked. Shyamalan told EW.com about Grint, "He came in and auditioned, and I just saw a different person. I don't know if I've ever seen this kind of reinvention from child actor to adult actor in my life, it's amazing."
In May 2020, Grint and longtime girlfriend Georgia Groome welcomed their first child, daughter Wednesday G. Grint.
Without a doubt, the erstwhile child actor who played the awkward Neville Longbottom has made the biggest splash in the then-and-now department, as news of Lewis' grown-up hotness has since traversed the globe.
Lewis has primarily done stage and screen work in his native England, including the BBC One miniseries The Syndicate, the 2016 tear-jerker Me Before You and the 2018 revenge thriller Terminal with Margot Robbie. In 2015, he raved about the enjoyable time he was having playing a soldier in the BBC Three dramedy Bluestone 42, about a bomb disposal squad in Afghanistan.
"Potter was an amazing and a unique experience that I was privileged to have been a part of," Lewis told RadioTimes.com, "but I've never been as involved with or as proud of a project as I have with Bluestone 42—I've had so much fun being a part of it, so much more than I've ever had before as an actor, definitely."
On the Mantality podcast in January 2020, he said he'd been filming All Creatures Great and Small for Channel 5—an update of the classic BBC show that ran from 1978 to 1990 based on the books by James Herriot. The title might not mean a lot to some, Lewis noted, but it was "a bit of an institution" in Britain (and it's since come to Masterpiece on PBS).
He's a private fellow, but we do know that he married Angela Jones in 2018 and that they made at stop at the Wizarding World of Harry Potter World—the very place where they first met—in October 2019. They live in Florida, where Jones is from.
The nefarious Draco Malfoy (two consecutive MTV Movie Awards for Best Villain) was really a platinum-haired doll with a heart of gold in real life. In the summer of 2011 he was in Rise of the Planet of the Apes, but has since been in less CGI-heavy films, most notably the period dramas Belle and A United Kingdom.
He blew fanboys-and-girls' minds showing up as Julian "Dr. Alchemy" Albert on the CW's The Flash in 2016. Additionally, Felton starred on the YouTube Premium sci-fi drama Origin and the films Ophelia, Braking for Whales and the World War II thriller Burial. Also a singer-songwriter, he has released several EPs over the years as well, and his Instagram, where he delightfully makes soup, plays guitar, hangs out with his dog and has the occasional Potter reunion, is one of the most joyful places on the Internet.
Felton dated Jade Olivia Gordon—Draco's flash-forward wife, Astoria Malfoy—for seven years before their breakup in 2016. The actor released his memoir, Beyond the Wand: The Magic and Mayhem of Growing Up a Wizard, in 2022, opening up about his struggles with childhood fame, substance abuse issues and finally set the record straight about his relationship with Emma Watson.
"I've always had a secret love for Emma, though not perhaps in the way that people might want to hear," he wrote. "That isn't to say there's never been a spark between us. There most definitely has, only at different times."
While nothing romantic formed from that spark, they still have love for each other as friends. "I don't think I was ever in love with Emma," Felton explained, "but I loved and admired her as a person in a way that I could never explain to anybody else."
The auburn-haired actress was barely 10 when she started playing Ginny Weasley, going from "Ron's little sister" to Harry Potter's soul mate over the course of the films. In 2011 Wright won the Most Edgy Look Award at the Rodial Beauty Awards and made her London Fashion Week debut walking the runway for London-based designer Katie Eary.
Wright graduated from London College of Communication and formed her own production company, BonBonLumière, in 2012. In addition to acting in such non-Potter movies as After the Dark and Who Killed Nelson Nutmeg?, the artist and activist has written and directed her own short films, including Separate We Come, Separate We Go, starring David Thewlis (the Remus Lupin); 2014's Know Thyself, with Christian Coulson, who played Tom Riddle; and Medusa's Ankles featuring Jason Isaacs, aka Lucius Malfoy. In 2021, Wright released her first book, Go Gently, which offered readers tips on how to become involved in the climate movement.
In December 2019, Wright joined Watson, Felton, Lewis and Evanna Lynch for a reunion that, happily, someone thought to take a picture of. "Time turning," Wright captioned the pic, punctuating the sentiment with a lightning bolt.
She was previously engaged to Sweeney Todd star Jamie Campbell Bower, who played a young Gellert Grindelwald in Harry Potter and the Death Hallows Part 1, but they called it off in 2012. She then dated Simon Hammerstein for several years before finding love with Andrew Lococo in 2020. The pair got married in March 2022. In April 2023, Bonnie announced that she is pregnant with their first child.
Not to take away Fred and George Weasley's individuality or anything… but Ron's twin older brothers and Hogwarts' resident pranksters were indeed played by actual twins (Oliver is 13 minutes older and has a mole on the right side of his neck). They have since played twins in other films, including Our Own Worst Enemy and Last Night in Soho, directed by Edgar Wright, while James has done more acting on his own.
Another way to tell them apart: Oliver has been married to Katie Humpage since 2015 and they have two daughters, while James exchanged vows with Annika Ostle the following year.
The brothers remain as close as ever, hosting a podcast together called Normal Not Normal and have interviewed former co-stars such as Evanna Lynch, Katie Leung and Alfred Enoch.
The British actor started out in the Hogwarts student ensemble as fellow Gryffindor Dean Thomas and, after doing a slew of theater in England and popping up in the likes of Broadchurch and Sherlock, starred on four seasons of How to Get Away With Murder. There he played the well-intentioned but inevitably morally compromised and doomed law student Wes, though he returned for a cameo as—SPOILER ALERT—Wes' own son in the mindboggling final season in 2020. He has since appeared in Apple TV+'s Foundation and he is also a graduate of The Queen's College, Oxford.
Chris Columbus was looking for a 15-to-17-year-old to play the specter of 16-year-old Tom Riddle in Harry Potter and the Chamber of Secrets, but the 23-year-old Coulson won the part anyway. He's been working in film and TV ever since, most notably playing Damien George on Nashville, Sebastian in the Golden Globe-winning Amazon Prime series Mozart in the Jungle and Benjamin on High Fidelity, the Hulu reboot of the book-turned-movie starring Zoë Kravitz as the lovelorn, list-making record store owner, now set in Brooklyn.
After beating out roughly 3,000 other aspirants to play Harry's Goblet of Fire-era crush, Cho Chang, the classically trained Scottish actress did theater and TV on her side of the pond, including the series White Dragon and Chimerica. Most recently she appeared in the BBC One limited series The Nest. On the big screen, she played the daughter of Jackie Chan's character (whose death in a terrorist bombing he spends the movie avenging) in the 2017 action-thriller The Foreigner. She currently stars on the Amazon Prime TV series The Peripheral, which was recently renewed for a second season. Leung revealed in a December 2022 Instagram post that she had welcomed her first child, a son named Wolf.
In March 2021, Leung, who is of Chinese descent, opened up about the hate she received online after her casting was announced.
"I was like, Googling myself at one point and I was on this website which was dedicated to kind of Harry Potter fandom and I remember reading all the comments. It was a lot of racist s--t," Leung said on the Chinese Chippy Girl podcast. "And then somebody had actually created a website, a hate site—it was like, if you disagree with this casting, then click on this button and then it would just be like a count of how many people disagreed with the casting and you would just see a number...I know, it's awful. It's so awful."
Gosh, whatever happened to the lad who played ill-fated heartthrob Cedric Diggory in Harry Potter and the Goblet of Fire…
Oh, right: Pattinson landed the lead in the other major YA franchise roiling hearts and minds, The Twilight Saga, and played brooding vampire Edward Cullen in five films, dating co-star Kristen Stewart along the way.
Since then he has distinguished himself in the acting department with gritty turns in independent films like Maps to the Stars, Cosmopolis, The Rover, Good Time and The Lighthouse. But he returned to big budget blockbusters when he donned the iconic cape and scowl as the titular DC superhero in 2022's The Batman.
Previously engaged to FKA twigs, Pattinson has been dating model and actress Suki Waterhouse since 2018.
The statuesque Fleur Delacour from Beauxbatons Academy in France, chosen to represent her school in the Triwizard Tournament, eventually marries Ron's groovy big brother Bill.
Since then Poésy has worked steadily in film and TV, most prominently on Gossip Girl, the dark comedy In Bruges, the English and French crime series The Tunnel and in Genius: Picasso on National Geographic Channel. The French actress appeared in Christopher Nolan's Tenant opposite her former Triwizard Tournament opponent, Robert Pattinson, and the Apple TV+ series The Essex Serpent. She will next star in The Walking Dead: Daryl Dixon, the highly anticipated spinoff centering on Norman Reedus' beloved titular character from the zombie franchise.
Poésy has a son, Liam, who was born in 2017, and welcomed a second child in 2019.
"I was thinking today how much it's made me closer to women, somehow; closer to women in the centuries before, the whole clinical aspect of being pregnant and then becoming a mum and giving birth, it makes you think a lot," she told The Guardian at the time. "It's made my admiration for women even stronger."
The angelic-looking actress stole her scenes as the scatterbrained but heroic Luna Lovegood starting in Harry Potter and the Order of the Phoenix—but she admitted that she struggled to get acting work after being part of the iconic franchise.
"It was just weird because we were getting all this fan mail and all this attention," Lynch told Bustle in 2019. "But I found in the real world that wasn't reflected. And it was hard. I think for a while I really missed the validation of being in a giant film series where anything you did was just admired and gushed over.
A vegan herself since 2015, Lynch started a clean, cruelty-free beauty line, Kinder Beauty Box, in 2018, and co-hosts a podcast, Just Beings, with Dr. Melanie Joy. She came in third place on Dancing With the Stars in 2018 and she released her first book, The Opposite of Butterfly Hunting, in 2021.
She told Bustle that she remained especially close to Katie Leung and Scarlett Byrne (Pansy Parkington)—they were planning to go to a New Year's Eve party together to ring in 2020—and saw a lot of her former co-stars at conventions. "I think a lot of us have bonded more since the films," Lynch said. "Just because we're older and we're adults now. Say, for example, I hung out with the twins this weekend, James and Oliver [Phelps]. And I didn't talk to them much on the films because when you're 14 and whatever, they're 18 or 19, it seems like such a giant age gap. When you're adults it doesn't seem that much."
Draco's henchman Goyle also cleaned up his act since his Slytherin days, most recently appearing in the British crime drama Marcella with Anna Friel, the 2018 big-screen update of Robin Hood, the crime miniseries Murder at White House Farm and the spy drama Alex Rider. In 2016, he began his MMA career, though he recently had a small role in Disney+'s Andor.
Herdman is also dad to a son, Morgan, with longtime partner Jessica Worth.
Like most of the Harry Potter bullies, even Dudley Dursley was a perfectly nice bloke in real life. Mid-franchise, Melling started a workout regimen and got into such good shape he was almost recast before Deathly Hallows Part 1, but was able to stay on as Harry's portly spoiled cousin by wearing prosthetics. Though fairly unrecognizable from those days, Melling has worked consistently on stage and screen ever since, including roles in The Lost City of Z, the Coen brothers' The Ballad of Buster Scruggs and the HBO series His Dark Materials.
More recently, Melling reteamed with Joel Coen to play Malcolm in the director's take on The Tragedy of Macbeth, with Denzel Washington and Frances McDormand as the murderously ambitious main duo. Melling also appeared as Harry Beltik in the hit Netflix series The Queen's Gambit and co-starred opposite Charlize Theron in the streaming giant's action flick The Old Guard. And last year, he earned rave reviews for his turn as a young Edgar Allan Poe in The Pale Blue Eye.
So, nine years after the final Harry Potter film came out, life has indeed gone on for the franchise's young actors. Some journeys have been more charmed than others, but all have fallen into their respective grooves.
Literally, at times.
"Steve Jobs has a great speech where he talks about how the wrong turns in his life truly set him on the path that he needed to be on," Emma Watson mused in her Interview sit-down. "Anyway, what do I do? I bake. I'm pretty competitive about my chocolate chip banana bread. I don't think anyone can believe how good it is. It's really on another level. And I hang out with my cat. I love to travel…I love to dance.
"I'm the girl who will get up and dance with zero alcohol in her system. You need give me no excuse. A great song comes on and I'm there; it's happening."