Although Emma Watson and Daniel Radcliffe played best friends forever — Harry Potter and Hermoine Granger — in the Harry Potter film series, turns out their thoughts in real life don’t match all that fine. This comes after Watson agreed to do a film that got rejected pretty brutally by Radcliffe before her.
This film was This Is the End, which initially was offered to the Kill Your Darlings actor. However, Daniel Radcliffe ended up turning down the film because the script was ‘sh-tty’, which taught the scriptwriters an important lesson. Following this, the script was offered to the Noah actress, and unlike her Harry Potter co-star, Emma Watson agreed to do it for a strange reason.
Why Emma Watson Readily Signed Up For This Is the End
This Is the End is one of the most popular dark comedy pictures to have been created to date. So when Emma Watson was offered the script for it, she agreed to sign up for it even though her Harry Potter co-star Daniel Radcliffe had previously rejected it.
During an interview with Flicks and Bits, The Perks of Being a Wallflower actress shared her initial reaction to the script (via Digital Spy):
“I thought it sounded crazy,” Watson said. “I remember trying to get my head around it on the phone to my agent who was like, ‘So, it’s Seth Rogen and Jonah Hill and James Franco and Danny McBride and all these other comedians. Seth Rogen and Evan Goldberg are making it, and all the actors are playing themselves, and it’s going to be the end of the world… and they want you in the movie.’”
What she truly liked about the movie was its funny storyline and the ‘strong, badass, funny characters’ they had written for the only two women in the film. Continuing to share how she reacted while finding out that the creators wanted her for the film, Watson said:
“I’m like, ‘What? Why? How?’ I had so many questions. I just remember reading it and thinking it’s hilarious, I thought it was the most crazy, absurd premise for a story I’d ever heard. I had to do it.”
However, the version that Emma Watson got wasn’t the version that was offered to Daniel Radcliffe. In fact, if anything, Radcliffe even inspired scriptwriters to change the script for good.
Daniel Radcliffe’s Rejection Of This Is the End Taught The Scriptwriters A Lesson
Way before Emma Watson, filmmakers Seth Rogen and Evan Goldberg initially wanted to cast Daniel Radcliffe in This Is the End. However, The Lost City actor ended up turning it down.
Talking to Buzzfeed, Goldberg shared Radcliffe’s response to the original script.
“Two years before we brought it to anybody else, we brought it to Daniel Radcliffe and he rejected it because it was s***ty, it wasn’t good enough,” Goldberg said. “It was a bad early version. He taught us a lesson. We learned something from him that day.”
But thanks to Daniel Radcliffe, the two scriptwriters realized the mistake they were making with the script.
“The initial version was too obvious,” Goldberg said. “Daniel Radcliffe–Harry Potter jokes and James Franco [as a] fashion-snobby materialistic guy. Jonah Hill was being mean to everybody. And so we changed it all. We made Franco have this endearing love for Seth and we made Jonah turn into this big softy and we just mixed things up. We made it a little too obvious at first.”
Thus, the revised version was offered to all the actors, and everyone agreed to do it including Emma Watson. Still, Evan Goldberg still felt that had they waited for a while and offered him the script again, Radcliffe just might have agreed to sign up for it.
“We got too excited, we jumped the gun on that. If we waited another year, I bet [Daniel Radcliffe] would have done it,” Goldberg added.
Nonetheless, the film was made and it added another golden star – a comedy one, this time – on Emma Watson’s star-studded career — a chance that Radcliffe inevitably missed.
