Can you believe it’s almost been 24 years since Rupert Grint made his debut as Ron Weasley in the Harry Potter franchise?
The hilarious character, whose family are looked down on by the wizarding community, accidentally befriends a bespectacled boy on the train to Hogwarts School of Witchcraft and Wizardry, only to realise he’s in for seven years worth of raucous action and deadly schemes.
Since concluding his role in 2011, Grint, now 36, has gone on to star opposite Ron Perlman in the crime-comedy Moonwalkers, appear in the 2023 hit Knock at the Cabin and an episode of Guillermo del Toro’s Cabinet of Curiosities.
Another of the actor’s crowning moments is his stint as Julian Pearce in Servant—an Apple TV+ thriller that was executively produced by M. Night Shyamalan.
Ahead of the programme’s debut in 2019, Grint took part in a press tour where he discussed speculation that his Harry Potter co-star Emma Watson, 34, was embroiled in a romance with one of her co-stars.
In an interview, the father-of-one heard how the Hermione Granger alumna was allegedly ‘self-partnering’.
The ‘self-partnering’ phrase came about when she completed an interview with British Vogue in 2019 and said that she never believed the whole ‘I’m happy single’ spiel.
“I was like: ‘This is totally spiel.’ It took me a long time, but I’m very happy [being single]. I call it being self-partnered,” she explained.
Later, her co-star Tom Felton, 37, who played antagonist Draco Malfoy in all eight Harry Potter films, praised the ‘incredibly smart and lovely’ actress and admitted he too was ‘happily self-partnered’, as per the Daily Mail.
When asked in the Entertainment Tonight interview whether he could ever see Watson and Felton as a romantic item, Grint agreed that he ‘could’.
“There was always something, a little bit of a spark,” he admitted. “I don’t want to start anything.”
When pressed to reveal if anyone else on the set of Harry Potter dated, he said: “No, not really.
“It’s like any kind of playground romances,” Grint continued.
He then admitted he ‘didn’t have any sparks’ with anyone behind the scenes.
Previously, Watson has described her lifelong bond with Felton as ‘one of the purest loves [she] can think of’.
"You know that person in your life who makes you feel seen?” she wrote in the forward for the actor’s memoir, Beyond the Wand: the Magic and Mayhem of Growing Up a Wizard.
“That person who is somehow a witness to all that unfolds? That person who knows — really knows — what is happening to you and what you're going through, without anything having to be said? For me, that person is Tom Felton."
The Little Women star went on to say that Felton had a ‘heart the size of a planet’ and that their friendship has allowed her to ‘move through some of the most challenging and soul-searching moments in my life’.
In HBO Max’s Harry Potter 20th Anniversary: Return to Hogwarts reunion special, Watson doubled down, claiming nothing had ‘ever, ever, ever’ happened romantically between her and her pal.
“We just love each other. That's all I could say about that.”
Meanwhile, Felton wrote in his autobiography that he’s always had a ‘secret love’ for Watson, lamenting that the pair have fostered feelings for one another at different times.
"I remember using the familiar old line: 'I love her like a sister'," he penned.
"But there was more to it than that. I don't think I was ever in love with Emma, but I loved and admired her as a person in a way that I could never explain to anybody else."
