Emma Watsons New Love: Real or Revenge?

Just a few months ago, appeared to be very much a single woman. Falling in love, she said, ‘might be quite easy to do in some ways’. ‘The hard part,’ she went on, ‘is finding someone who actually wants to be in a dance with you.’

Judging by her very cosy appearance in a Mexican airport last week, it would seem the 35-year-old star’s dance card is currently full.

Watson, who has taken a step away from Hollywood in recent years, is known for keeping her romantic entanglements strictly out of the limelight. But there was no disguising the frisson between the star – currently studying for a doctorate at – and her handsome partner as they embraced in a bustling Mexican airport. Bare legged and in flip-flops, she shared a tender kiss with her beau.

The duo were also photographed in a restaurant and have reportedly been spotted at ’s exclusive beach resort of Punta Mita, as well as on the slopes of Courchevel, in the French Alps.

So just who is the man who has swept Watson – whose last major film appearance was in ’s Little Women, released in December 2019 – off her feet?

Mexican tech entrepreneur Gonzalo Hevia Bailleres is heir to a multi-billion-pound business that has cemented his family as one of the wealthiest in Latin America.

Not that his family status is likely to make much difference to Watson, who has had a string of eligible boyfriends, although admittedly none with quite such a wealthy pedigree as Hevia Bailleres.

Watson’s most recent long-term partnership was with Brandon Green, son of disgraced retail tycoon Sir Philip Green, but that ended after around 18 months in 2023.

Last year she was dating academic Kieran Brown, whom she met while studying for her part-time master’s degree – since extended to become a DPhil – at New College, whose 14th-century buildings she might recall as a film location for Harry Potter And The Order Of The Phoenix.

Then, in October, shortly after making those remarks about love, Watson was spotted sightseeing in Italy with another man – tech tycoon Austin Kevitch, who has previously dated singer Camilla Cabello and who is co-founder of the dating app Lox Club.

Whether that was a romantic entanglement or just a trip to share dating tips is unclear but, judging by the events of last week, Watson’s attentions are now firmly focused elsewhere.

The actress – who was propelled to stardom aged ten when she first played Hermione Granger in JK Rowling’s film franchise – is understood to have met Hevia Bailleres through mutual friends.

They have since become so close that he has already introduced her to his parents.

Considered one of Mexico’s most eligible bachelors, the entrepreneur is the founder and chief executive officer of Lok, a startup in the tech sector, which focuses on smart locker technology.

Before that he founded and served as CEO of Insaite, an artificial intelligence company created in 2019 and sold in 2021 to a larger software firm.

He also has his own investment firm with offices in New York, Miami and Mexico City, focused on ‘transformative technologies and globally scalable projects’.

Clearly a successful businessman in his own right. But there is a family pedigree. The Bailleres are one of the wealthiest families in Mexico with a net worth of more than £14 billion.

The family business – founded by his great-grandfather and expanded by grandfather Albert – is Mexico’s huge conglomerate Grupo BAL, which owns the country’s second-largest mining firm and high-end department store El Palacio di Hierro, the Mexican equivalent to Harrods.

Alberto had six sons and one daughter – Maria Teresa Gual, who is Hevia Bailleres’ mother and who has continued to work in the family firm, sitting on the board of directors for El Palacio and serving as a member of the Mexican Association of Culture.

Hevia Bailleres’ father, Gonzalo Hevia, is a real estate director.

Putting their son through the exclusive Swiss boarding school Le Rosey, where fees are close to £100,000-a-year, it seems would not have troubled their finances.

Hevia Bailleres’ burgeoning romance with Watson is not his first spin in the spotlight. 

He previously dated glamorous Spanish-born Mexican singer Belinda Peregrin from late 2022 to early 2024.

It was, apparently, a difficult break-up and speculation is rife among Belinda’s fan base that the cosy images of the businessman’s latest love have been leaked in a revenge game between bitter exes.

Why? It all comes down to some rather pointed song lyrics.

Fans were quick to spot that Belinda’s hit 2025 single Heterocromia referenced a relationship with an ex who comes from generational wealth.

The title refers to the rare condition heterochromia, which causes someone to have two differently coloured eyes. Tellingly, Hevia Bailleres is said to have the condition.

The translated lyrics to the song – which has had 23million plays on YouTube alone – go: ‘You deceived me with your heterochromia; two people, one same face. So high and mighty and with such an empty mind. You sold me a damn fantasy, you were just playing golf, drinking your Aperol, looking for approval, dressed like a parrot...’

It later goes on: ‘Thank God I never met my ex-mother-in-law, because I’m not from high society and she gets all worked up. I want to live my way.’

Quite the riposte, if, of course, it was directed at the man who now appears to be romancing Watson.

Watson is unlikely to be fazed by the prospect of a monied mother-in-law from hell, however.

With an estimated £42 million to her name, a ski chalet, London townhouse and her own luxury gin brand, she can more than hold her own in whatever circle she inhabits.

When not jet-setting, she can be found relaxing at her nine- bedroom home in Oxford’s charming Jericho quarter, or sometimes pottering around on her bicycle, a mode of transport she was forced to adopt more frequently after being hit with a driving ban for speeding around town in her Audi.

But she has, too, spoken of the pitfalls of fame and her battles with anxiety.

Shortly before her 30th birthday, she told Vogue magazine she had suffered ‘incredible anxiety’ about having not married or started a family by that landmark age, while describing her single status as being ‘self-partnered’.

Could Hevia Bailleres bring her the stability she’s been seeking? On Jay Shetty’s On Purpose podcast late last year she spoke of how she recognised that although she had ‘the career and the life that looks like the dream’, but added that in reality she was not happy.

‘I’ve realised that some of the people I’ve been attracting on the dating front think they’re dating some previous version of me who still exists in some ways, but who isn’t actually who I am now,’ she said.

In the same interview, she reflected on how her celebrity image often enters a room before she does. ‘It’s funny, occasionally people will apologise to me for the fact they’ve not seen my films.

‘And I will be like, “Please don’t apologise. That is bliss to me”.’