Emma Watson Cries While Revealing Her Struggle to Make Friends in Hollywood: ‘Bone-Breakingly Painful’

Emma Watson is opening up about the struggles of forming lasting friendships in Hollywood.

While on the latest episode of Jay Shetty's On Purpose podcast, released Wednesday, Sept. 24, the star, 35, got emotional as she discussed the challenges of making friends in the film industry.

“I was coming to those sets with an expectation that I think I had developed on Harry Potter, which was that the people I worked with were going to be my family and that we were going to be lifelong friends,” she explained.

Watson, who hasn't been in a movie since 2019's Little Women, continued, “I came to work looking for friendship and that was a very painful experience for me outside of Harry Potter and in Hollywood, like bone-breakingly painful because most people don't come to those environments looking for friendships."

“They're looking for: ‘This is my chance. This is my role. This is what I want out of it, I'm focused. This is my job. This is my career.' And I was not of that mindset," she said.

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Watson played the role of Hermione Granger in the Harry Potter film series from 2001 to 2011, forming tight-knit bonds with her fellow cast members. In the interview, Watson said she found the friendship rejection that came on other projects "really painful" to endure.

“It's so unusual to make a set of films for 12 years and we were a community,” Watson added in reference to the Harry Potter

 franchise. “We really were. And so I took that as an expectation into my other workplaces, and I just got my ass kicked. I really did.”

Asked if competition, envy or hierarchy was the reason for difficult friendships, she said, “I think it was a combination. It was a Molotov cocktail of all of the above.” Watson admitted she is “not thick-skinned,” adding that “maybe I wasn’t built for those highly competitive environments.”

“It broke me,” she said as she got emotional. “But in a way I’m proud that it did because I guess that means I have something left to break. I have a heart left to break.” Speaking through tears, Watson added that despite it being a “hard learning" experience, she was proud that she was able to “keep my humanity."

She said she used to think she wasn't "strong enough" but has come to realize that if she were "to have come out on top" it "would have been a greater failure, I think, in terms of who I actually care about being."

Watson also opened up about the overwhelming nature of attending red carpets for movie premieres, adding that costars pretend to be friends when promoting their films.

"I think that was the other thing that was really difficult about movies," she said. "You always get asked when you're promoting these big films, 'So do you guys hang out on set and like are you all friends?' "

She continued, "And everyone sort of like nods enthusiastically. But the truth is no one has seen each other outside of work, like, very rarely, mostly because the schedule is insane. Everyone's so tired that when they get any time off you're going straight back to your hotel room to try and claw in any piece of rest that you possibly can."

"Friendships require time and trust and presence, and those things very rarely come about," Watson said. "They can, and they do occasionally, but it it's more of a solar eclipse than an everyday situation. But you have to pretend. I think that's the part that starts to feel icky after a while is you have to pretend that you're all best friends."

"What's so sad, and and I know this isn't just the case for me, but I think people wish they were," she added. "I think we wish we did have those real connections and we did have that real support. So having to pretend that something exists that you actually really want but don't have is … pretty grainy in the wound."