Whip up a love potion! Daniel Radcliffe, Rupert Grint, Emma Watson and more Harry Potter stars grew up during the course of the eight-film series, meaning they began dating — and, in some cases, settled down — with the world’s eyes on them.
Radcliffe was 11 when he started filming the first movie, Harry Potter and the Sorcerer’s Stone, in 2000. Watson, for her part, was 10, while Grint was the eldest of the trio at 12.
Although Watson and Grint’s characters, Hermione Granger and Ron Weasley, respectively, connected on screen, the actress developed feelings for another costar: Tom Felton, who played Draco Malfoy. “Between the ages of 10 and 12, I had a really terrible crush on Tom Felton,” she explained on The Jonathan Ross Show in 2012.
“We love a bad guy, and he was a few years older and he had a skateboard, and that just did it really,” Watson continued. “He used to do tricks on it. He was so cool. He totally knew [I had a crush]. And the thing is, he’d turn and go, ‘Oh, I see her in a younger, sisterly way.’ And it just broke my heart, still does.”
Grint confirmed the bond between the Beauty and the Beast star and Felton in November 2019. “There was always something,” he told Entertainment Tonight. “There was a little bit of a spark.”
The Servant actor added: “We were kids. It was like any kind of playground romance. … I didn’t have any sparks. I was spark-free.”
Despite what could have been an awkward situation for the duo, Felton and Watson remained friends after they wrapped filming on the final movie in the franchise, 2011’s Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows: Part 2.
“Lovely Emma. We do see each other quite a lot actually. We just don’t always post pictures about it,” the Flash alum exclusively told Us Weekly in November 2018. “Everyone loves the reunion of it. We’re reuniting all the time. We just don’t always post it on Instagram.”
Felton even taught Watson some of his skateboarding skills that she admired when they were kids. “She was in my neighborhood and I hadn’t seen her for a few months. And I decided to take her for a skateboarding lesson, which she was very good at,” he revealed. “She’s quite hard on herself. But she’s actually very good at it. So yeah, that was fun. I always enjoy spending time with her.”
Evanna Lynch, meanwhile, shared a behind-the-scenes account of the timeline surrounding Watson and Felton’s attraction. “Oh, it was so disappointing for me because I joined on the fifth one. I was on Order of the Phoenix and there was this sense that exciting things had happened in the last movie, and I just missed it,” she exclusively told Us in June 2021. “[I joined when] everyone had kind of grown out of their crushes and they were moving on to, like, people in the outside world. And I felt that like, damn, I missed all the drama! It was so fun the last film, according to some stories. But no, by the time I got there, they were all mature and those hormones were calming down.”
As for herself, the My Name Is Emily actress hinted that she had a crush on “everyone” in the cast.
Scroll through the gallery below to revisit the dating histories of Harry Potter stars!