Here's every major movie role Emma Watson passed on. As much as people still know her best for playing the brainy and brave Hermione Granger in the Harry Potter movies, Watson has gone on to find her niche as a character actor in the years since The Boy Who Lived's story wrapped up on the big screen. Off-screen, she's kept equally busy, between her finishing her university studies, working in the modeling and fashion industries, and even being appointed as a UN Women Goodwill ambassador.
Being as young as she is and having primarily starred in the Harry Potter franchise for the first decade of her acting career, Watson simply hasn't had the chance to turn down too many notable projects at this stage. On top of that, she publicly stepped away from making films for a period in the mid-2010s in order to focus on first finishing her schooling, then to take a year-long break and devote more time to her activism (in addition to just stepping away from the hustle and bustle of Hollywood for a while).
Similarly, when it comes to the more widely-publicized casting rumors involving Watson in the past - for example, when she was reported to be in the running to portray Lisbeth Salander in David Fincher's The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo movie adaptation - there's typically been little actual fire behind all of that smoke. Nevertheless, there have been a couple of significant film roles in recent years that Watson's openly admitted to passing on, along with one that she had to deny ever being interested in (and on more than one occasion).
Cinderella
While Disney's live-action remakes of its animated films are basically a cottage industry these days, that wasn't really the case until Kenneth Branagh directed Cinderella in 2015. But before Lily James signed on to play the movie's kindly (Cinder)Ella, Watson was initially approached to bring the character to life in her place. Instead, she took a pass and went on to portray Belle in Disney's live-action Beauty and the Beast remake a couple years later. As Watson explained during an interview with Total Film in 2017, "I didn't know they were going to make Beauty and the Beast at the time I turned down Cinderella. But when they offered me Belle, I just felt the character resonated with me so much more than Cinderella did." She went on to say that Belle simply encompasses many of the qualities she looks for in a role model, including her intelligence, independent nature, and integrity in the face of opposition from her disapproving neighbors.
Of the pair, Beauty and the Beast was the bigger box office success, yet Cinderella earned the stronger reviews, with James in particular picking up praise for her warm and endearing performance as the abused and downtrodden, yet always compassionate Ella. By comparison, Watson's turn as Belle was mostly well-received, though the film at large was criticized for going overboard in its attempts to fix both the character and story from the original animated movie by making them more woke (for lack of a more succinct description). Still, of the two roles, Belle was arguably the better match for Watson than Ella (and vice versa for James), so everything more or less worked out from a creative perspective, as far as who played which Disney princess goes.
Fifty Shades of Grey
Full disclosure: as far as the public is concerned, Watson didn't turn down the chance to play Anastasia Steele in Fifty Shades of Grey so much as she was never in the running to begin with. Still, that didn't prevent rumors about her potentially starring in the film adaptation of E.L. James' immensely-popular (if extremely polarizing) erotic Twilight fan fiction-turned novel from cropping up on multiple occasions. The first time around, in the summer of 2012, Watson shot down the idea, telling EW “I haven’t read the book, I haven’t a read a script, nothing." In spite of this, additional rumors began to appear the following March, prompting Watson to tweet from her verified Twitter account "Who here actually thinks I would do 50 Shades of Grey as a movie? Like really. For real. In real life."
The role of Anastasia would ultimately be filled in the movie by Dakota Johnson, with Jamie Dornan signing on to play her troubled billionaire lover Christian Grey. Despite earning generally negative reviews, Fifty Shades of Grey was a big hit at the box office, taking in over half a billion dollars. Interestingly, some critics praised director Sam Taylor-Johnson and writer Kelly Marcel for their attempts to transform James' source material into more of a self-aware examination of women's sexuality and the power dynamics of kink - that is, the kind of subversive Fifty Shades of Grey adaptation that might've actually garnered Watson's interest. In the end, though, their efforts were undermined by the amount of creative control James was granted over the film, and Taylor-Johnson later voiced her regret about having signed on in the first place.
La La Land
Winner of 6 Oscars (and, infamously, mistakenly crowned Best Picture before the real winner that year, Moonlight, was announced), La La Land was both a critical and commercial success when it released in 2016. Originally, the film was set to reunite director Damien Chazelle and his Whiplash headliner Miles Teller, with Watson also starring as the wannabe movie starlet Mia. However, having already committed to appearing in Beauty and the Beast by that point, Watson was forced to drop out before production began. As she explained during an interview with ITV in March 2017, "With a movie like Beauty and the Beast it’s like three months prep, it’s like three or four months shooting, it’s in the UK. I had to be there to do that and, as I was saying before, you can’t half-arse a project like this - you’re in or you’re out."
Emma Stone would later sign on to play Mia in La La Land instead, with Teller being similarly replaced (albeit, for different reasons) by Ryan Gosling as jazz pianist Sebastian. Truthfully, it's hard to imagine the characters being played by anyone else; in addition to having crackling screen chemistry, Stone and Gosling might've been the perfect match for the movie's tone and style (a throwback to flashy Golden Age Hollywood musicals, but with the soul of a modern indie film and a melancholic love story inspired by The Umbrellas of Cherbourg). The movie also landed Stone an Oscar for her performance, which is all the more reason to think she was the right fit for the project in the end. Amusingly, though, Watson and Stone swapped spots a couple years later, after Stone dropped out of Greta Gerwig's Little Women and Watson took her spot as Meg March.