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Emma Watson has spoken out about her decision to pause her acting career in favour of academia in a new interview with Hollywood Authentic.
The star, best known for her role as Hermione Granger in the Harry Potter films, has not acted in a film since December 2018, when she completed work on Greta Gerwig’s adaptation of Little Women, and said she was now “maybe the happiest and healthiest I’ve ever been”.
She continued by saying that while she had enjoyed the work itself, the ancillary duties of promotion were less to her taste.
“The bigger component than the actual job itself is the promotion and selling of that piece of work, this piece of art. The balance of that can get quite thrown off,” Watson said.
“I think I’ll be honest and straightforward, and say: I do not miss selling things. I found that to be quite soul-destroying. But I do very much miss using my skill-set, and I very much miss the art. I just found I got to do so little of the bit that I actually enjoyed.”
Watson has been in the public eye since 2000, when she was first cast in the franchise adapted from JK Rowling’s books. Other key roles included Ballet Shoes (2007), My Week With Marilyn (2011), The Perks of Being a Wallflower (2012) and Sofia Coppola’s The Bling Ring (2013).
She then starred as Russell Crowe’s daughter in Darren Aronofsky’s Noah (2014) and as Belle in the live-action adaptation of Beauty and the Beast (2017), before taking on the role of Meg March in Little Women.
Although those three films were substantial hits, some of Watson’s other films were less successful, with 2016’s The Colony taking just £47 at the UK box office.
“The moment you get on a film set,” Watson continued, “you don’t get very long for rehearsal. But the moment you get to talk through a scene – or I got to prepare and think about how I wanted to do something – and then the minute the camera rolls, and getting to just completely forget about everything else in the world other than that one moment – it’s such an intense form of meditation. Because you just cannot be anywhere else.
“It’s so freeing. I miss that profoundly. But I don’t miss the pressure. I forgot it was a lot of pressure. I did a small thing for a play, just with my friends. I was like, ‘Bloody hell, this is stressful!’ And that wasn’t even for a real public audience or anything. I don’t miss that.”
Watson graduated from Brown university in the US with a degree in English literature in 2014 and is currently studying for a DPhil in creative writing at Oxford. She remains an active campaigner for environmental justice and climate change mitigation and has spoken out for solidarity with the people of Palestine.
Her stance on transgender issues has put her – as well as co-stars Daniel Radcliffe and Rupert Grint – in direct opposition to Rowling, and their ongoing feud continues to make headlines. The actor won the top prize at the inaugural genderless MTV movie and TV awards in 2017.
In her acceptance speech, Watson said the award “says something about how we perceive the human experience”.
Along with her brother, Alex, Watson also runs a sustainable gin brand called Renais.
“The most important thing, really – or the foundation of your life – is your home and friends and family. I think I worked so hard for so long that my life sort of bottomed out,” she told Hollywood Authentic.
“The bottom fell out of the piece, which was actually me and my life. So I needed to go and do some construction work. Some good foundations for anything else to grow from. Because if you don’t have that, there’s a kind of mania that ensues; a kind of panic where you move from one project to the next, kind of terrified of the void in between them. You realise you don’t have a rhythm to your life.”
Speaking to the Financial Times in a 2023 interview, Watson said she “wasn’t very happy” with the acting profession and “felt a bit caged”.
