Emma Watson spent part of March being photographed at an airport in Mexico City, kissing a man most people had never heard of before. In the same stretch of weeks, Jennifer Lawrence was on a film set in the Czech Republic, in character opposite Leonardo DiCaprio for a new Martin Scorsese picture. The two events had nothing to do with each other beyond the timing, and that turns out to be a fair summary of most of what connects these two women after more than a decade of being mentioned in the same breath.
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Are Emma Watson and Jennifer Lawrence friends
Not really, no. Not in any way either of them has ever described in public.
The pairing goes back to a Christian Dior show in Paris in July 2014, where Lawrence pressed her hand into Watson’s face for photographers, a joke both women appeared to enjoy at the time. The following year, Watson publicly backed an essay Lawrence wrote about the pay gap between men and women in Hollywood. Outside of those two moments, nothing about a relationship between them has ever been reported.
Both were born in 1990. Both spent their twenties fronting the biggest young adult franchise of their era, Watson as Hermione Granger in Harry Potter, Lawrence as Katniss Everdeen in The Hunger Games. That is what put them in the same sentence for over a decade, well before anyone checked whether they got along at all.
| Emma Watson | Jennifer Lawrence | |
|---|---|---|
| Born | 15 April 1990 | 15 August 1990 |
| Known for | Hermione Granger, Harry Potter | Katniss Everdeen, The Hunger Games |
| Last screen role | Little Women (2019) | Die My Love (2025) |
| Current project | No film role announced | What Happens at Night, with Martin Scorsese |
| Relationship | Reportedly dating Gonzalo Hevia Baillรจres | Married to Cooke Maroney since 2019 |
How both women stepped back from the fame that made them
Both spent the years after their signature roles pulling away from the kind of attention that had defined their twenties, though in very different ways.
Watson’s version of that was almost total withdrawal from acting. Her last film role was Meg March in 2019’s Little Women, a part she took over after Emma Stone dropped out, and the only screen credit since has been a short film for Prada in 2022. Most of that time went into school instead. She had started a degree at Brown University in 2009, paused partway through for a year at Oxford in 2011, and graduated from Brown in 2014. In September 2023 she returned to Oxford again, this time for a master’s in creative writing at Lady Margaret Hall, the same college where she had already held a fellowship. Alongside her studies, she and her brother Alex launched a gin brand, Renais, in 2023, made from grapes grown on their father’s vineyard in Chablis, which took on outside investors and expanded into the United States the following year.
Lawrence never really stopped working, which is what made her retreat look so different. She married art dealer Cooke Maroney in 2019, had her first son, Cy, in 2022, and had a second son in early 2025 who has never been formally named by either parent, though he has been widely reported as Louie after fans spotted the name on a keychain in photographs taken in New York. In between, she built a production company, Excellent Cadaver, and used it to make films including No Hard Feelings and two documentaries, Bread and Roses, about women’s lives under Taliban rule, and Zurawski v Texas, about a reproductive rights court case, made with Chelsea and Hillary Clinton as executive producers.
Why 2026 has pulled both of them back into view
This year, both are visible again, through different doors.
For Watson, none of it has had anything to do with acting. She had been seen with a Mexican technology entrepreneur, Gonzalo Hevia Baillรจres, since late 2025, and it became public in March when photographs, first published by TMZ, showed the two of them together at an airport in Mexico City. That same month she made a rare public appearance at a pre Oscars dinner in Los Angeles. A little earlier, in January and February, she and her old co stars Daniel Radcliffe and Rupert Grint had spoken supportively about the young cast taking over their roles for HBO’s new Harry Potter series, and Watson told British Vogue she would happily do a reunion of her own in twenty years.
For Lawrence, all of it has come from work. Her performance in Die My Love, playing a mother going through postpartum psychosis while she was five months pregnant herself, earned a nine minute standing ovation at Cannes in May 2025 and a Golden Globe nomination that winter. When the Academy announced its Best Actress nominees on 22 January 2026, her name was not on the list. By March she was in the Czech Republic filming What Happens at Night for Martin Scorsese, opposite Leonardo DiCaprio, a project that had already been in development since the previous September.
Neither has said what happens next. Lawrence’s film does not yet have a release date, and Watson has not said whether she plans to act again.
