“I think a lot of us saw ourselves in Hermione, and also aspired to be her,” Yisrael says of the character’s appeal with female fans. “She was so confident most of the time. She would set boundaries and say, you’re not going to treat me this way. She had so much self-respect. Even being in college, I learned a lot from a 13-year-old female character in a book. I was just like, yeah, you’re right, don’t talk to her like that, don’t treat her like that. She was so strong and so powerful. Just almost like this perfect woman. She was smart and she was quick and she was clever and she was kind and she was considerate — everything. And I feel like we had never seen ourselves in a book like that. So it became something to admire and aspire to and be self-reflective.”