This is exactly how one would have imagined Hermione in 2022: Still roaming through libraries and rummaging through books.

The one who pulls book after book off the shelf isn't Hermione, it's British actress Emma Watson.

She embodied this ambitious, intelligent character from the fantasy saga "Harry Potter" in the films of the same name, a role with which she will always be associated. 

Caroline O. Jebens

Editor in the Society department at FAZ.NET.

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And that's why Watson, apparently unexpectedly like her fictional alter ego, found a letter of her own.

In it: No invitation to the Hogwarts Magic School, but for a reunion of the actors in the film series, the first part of which was released 20 years ago.

For an hour and a half, the actors find themselves together again on the screens of the subscribers to the Sky streaming platform.

Harry, Ron, Hermione, Voldemort, Sirius Black, Bellatrix Lestrange, the Weasley family, Luna Lovegood and Neville Longbottom, the Malfoys - they're all there, sitting together in the old movie sets. 

Focus on parallels between film and real life

The reunion looks extremely elaborate and lovingly designed - and is disenchanted precisely because of this: Important locations in the film are no longer the location of a fantastic event, but just backdrops. Harry Potter and his archenemy Bellatrix Lestrange sit in a dungeon and chat a little, because it's actually the now 32-year-old Daniel Radcliffe and the always charismatic Helena Bonham Carter.

The parallels between film and real life are particularly in focus: Radcliffe, who was not found at the casting, but was "chosen" by Christopher Columbus, who directed the first two films. Or Ron Weasley actor Rupert Grint, who has seven siblings himself, including a red-haired little sister. And of course Emma Watson, who was “smarter than all adults” on set. And that growing up was also quite real: Ron's first dance with a woman - Professor McGonagall in the fourth part of the saga - was Rupert Grints too, only with Dame Maggie Smith. 

It is therefore more interesting when those who were usually behind the camera now talk about their work, namely the four directors: Columbus, Alfonso Cuarón, Mike Newell and David Yates.

In the end, it was she and her film crews who visualized 4,500 pages of young people's novels for eight films.

Each of them had their job: Columbus putting together a cast that would last for more than ten years.

Cuarón, who created a new aesthetic when filming the third volume.

Newell, who challenged the performances of the young actors in the fourth part.

Yates, who gave this saga a worthy ending.

Because with the films, four years after the publication of the last volume, the whole Potter era that Joanne K. Rowling had created came to an end.

Women authors are not mythical beings

“The boy who survived” was the name of the famous chapter of the first volume, and at this reunion it becomes clear: the same cannot be said for the author. It occurs only three times in the total of ninety minutes and it says little of meaning. According to a report by Entertainment Weekly, it is archive material from 2019, and Rowling is said to have declined an invitation to the reunion. In the past three years, the author of the world's most successful youth book series polarized with her statements what place trans people have (or, in her opinion, should not have) in feminism. Several members of the film cast, including Radcliffe, Watson and Grint, distanced themselves from Rowling's statements.

For those who grew up with Harry Potter in the '90s, what this fictional world means to them can certainly be emotionally separated from the author. But it is also the same generation that would no longer distinguish between work and author: thanks to social media, women authors are no longer mythical beings who write their books in seclusion in an ivory tower. They also tweet and write essays, the rhetoric of which for many does not match what their work conveyed to them. “You fail to recognize that it matters not what someone is born, but what they grow to be!” Reads a voice off-screen in the middle of the reunion, a motto of Dumbledore, which in this context almost seems like an ironic comment: “ You are unable to see that it is not a matter of what someone was born as,but who he will. "

Hagrid stays

So it is helpful that this reunion should not be about Rowling or the books.

It's about the films that Warner Brothers grossed 6.7 billion euros and the PR that the Harry Potter universe urgently needs to get audiences for the offshoots of the very mediocre Fantastic Beasts series in the cinema.

And yet: When people come together in such a way, it's not just because it's exciting to see what has become of everyone, or because it's nice to hear the nostalgic anecdotes.

Because some places stay empty forever.

Alan Rickman, who played Severus Snape, Helen McCrory as Narcissa Malfoy, Richard Harris as the first Albus Dumbledore, Richard Griffiths as Vernon Dursley, and John Hurt as wandmaker Mr. Ollivander: So be it comforting to know that it is These films exist, as Robbie Coltrane put it touchingly: "When my grandchildren see the films, unfortunately I won't be there anymore." But Hagrid, he does.