Why Emma Stone Replaced Emma Watson In La La Land

Damien Chazelle's "La La Land" is a bittersweet tale of a romance that almost was. The story of Sebastian (Ryan Gosling) and Mia (Emma Stone) is of a love that is very much requited and yet, due to circumstances, simply cannot be. That theme of a near-miss is very much the real-life story of the movie as well as its fictional narrative in a number of ways. For one, the film infamously nearly won Best Picture at the Academy Awards. Although this was less an instance of a near-miss and more just a genuine mistake, there was a good minute there where the filmmakers thought it actually happened.

That's not the only near-miss that "La La Land" experienced during its journey from inception, to cinemas, to awards season. When the film was first being developed, Chazelle had two completely different actors in mind for the leading roles: Miles Teller and Emma Watson. Teller, of course, had been the star of Chazelle's breakout film, "Whiplash," and it seemed like the filmmaker was interested in turning the actor into his alter ego muse as many an auteur has done in the past (Alfred Hitchcock and Jimmy Stewart, John Carpenter, and Kurt Russell, and so on). Watson, on the other hand, was seeing her star rising beyond her fame as Hermione in the "Harry Potter" films around the time "La La Land" was being put together, and the announcement that she would be co-leading the film with Teller was a further indication of her increasing A-list status.

Alas, it just wasn't written in the (city of) stars that Watson would appear in "La La Land," though the reason isn't due to any shady shenanigans, creative differences, or anything too involved or scandalous. She simply ran afoul of a scheduling conflict, and there were no hard feelings on her part or Chazelle's. However, one could speculate whether or not Watson made the right call for her career, even if "La La Land" emerged unscathed by the switcheroo.

At the time, Emma Watson must've felt like she was caught between the proverbial rock and a hard place when having to choose between "La La Land" and the live-action adaptation of Disney's "Beauty and the Beast." Both were movie musicals, both featured a juicy role for her to play, and both had a good deal of buzz attached to them — the former the excitement of Chazelle's follow-up to his Oscar-winning predecessor, the latter the legacy of the classic French fairy tale and Disney's own 1991 animated feature that the film would be based on. If she could've done both, she probably would have, but as the actress explained to Vanity Fair in 2017, doing so would've done a disservice to one or both projects:

"['Beauty and the Beast'] wasn't a movie I could just sort of step into. I knew I had horse training, I knew I had dancing, I knew I had three months of singing ahead of me and I knew I had to be in London to really do that. This wasn't a movie I could just kind of parachute into. I knew I had to do the work, and I had to be where I had to be. So, you know, scheduling conflict-wise, it just didn't work out."

To be fair, it wasn't like Watson (and, presumably, Teller) had gone too far down the road with "La La Land" that it couldn't be a clean break when she left, as she elaborated:

"It's one of these frustrating things where names get attached to projects very early on as a way to kind of build anticipation or excitement for something that's coming before anything is really actually agreed or set in stone."

In the end, it seems like everything worked out well. Emma Stone and Ryan Gosling (whom Chazelle savvily re-paired after their work in "Crazy Stupid Love" and "Gangster Squad") took on "La La Land" with gusto, enough that Stone won the Academy Award for Best Actress. Meanwhile, "Beauty and the Beast" was released a year later, earning a billion dollars at the box office and finding itself nominated for a few Oscars a year after that. Those nominations did not include Best Actress for Watson, however, so one wonders whether Watson looks upon her choice to stay committed to "Beauty" over "La La Land" as her own missed opportunity. As the end of "La La Land" implies, the path not taken is the exclusive realm of fantasy; we can never know for sure.