Emma Watson’s Forgotten Crime Thriller Based on True Story Hits Netflix Today

Emma Watson ditched Hermione for a real-life crime spree.Sofia Coppola's forgotten thriller "The Bling Ring" hits Netflix today

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Most people know Emma Watson as the girl who spent a decade at Hogwarts. Far fewer remember what she did right after. Sofia Coppola’s The Bling Ring quietly lands on Netflix today, March 3, and it deserves a second look.

The 2013 crime thriller is rooted in one of the most bizarre real-life celebrity scandals of the late 2000s. Between October 2008 and August 2009, a gang of fame-obsessed California teenagers broke into the homes of some of Hollywood’s biggest stars and walked away with roughly $3 million in cash and belongings. The victims included Paris Hilton, Lindsay Lohan, Orlando Bloom, Audrina Patridge, and Megan Fox, among others.

Emma Watson’s Crime The Bling Ring Role Was Her Most Daring Post-Harry Potter

Watson plays Nicki, a character directly inspired by real-life burglar Alexis Neiers. It was a sharp departure from Hermione, cold, calculating, and fame-hungry in ways that had nothing to do with wands. Nicki isn’t the brains of the operation. She’s something more unsettling: a girl who treats a criminal arrest as a PR moment (via Indiewire)

Neiers herself was filming an E! reality show, Pretty Wild, at the time of her 2009 arrest. Cameras were rolling when she got taken in. Life and art blurred so thoroughly that Sofia Coppola cast the real detective who arrested Neiers Brett Goodkin to play himself in the film. He handcuffs Watson on screen, in a scene that mirrors his actual arrest. Paris Hilton, whose home the gang burglarized at least five times, let Coppola shoot inside her real house.

The True Story Behind the Netflix Crime Thriller Is Just as Wild as the Movie

The real Bling Ring operated with stunning brazenness. Rachel Lee and Nick Prugo, the group’s ringleaders, tracked their targets using Google Earth and gossip sites like TMZ to determine when celebrities were away from home (via Yahoo). Hilton reportedly left a key under her doormat. Lee eventually added it to her own keychain. The group went back to Hilton’s house so many times that she had not even noticed the first few break-ins.

Their downfall came at the hands of Patridge, who posted her home security footage online after a February 2009 burglary. A tip eventually led police to Prugo, who confessed and implicated the others. Lee was sentenced to four years in prison. Prugo received two years but served just one. Neiers was sentenced to six months in jail, three years of probation, and ordered to pay $600,000 in restitution to Bloom (Via Cosmopolitan).

Coppola built her screenplay from Nancy Jo Sales’ 2010 Vanity Fair article, The Suspects Wore Louboutins. The story was stranger than fiction before it ever became a film.

Now that it’s back on Netflix, does the movie hit differently over a decade later? Comment below.

The Bling Ring is now streaming on Netflix.

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