The ‘Harry Potter’ alum — who took a break from acting after 2019’s ‘Little Women’ — reveals the “freeing” part of acting she misses “profoundly,” while explaining why a “bigger component” of her acting career was “soul-destroying.”
Emma Watson is reflecting on her acting career — nearly seven years after she decided to step away.
While speaking with the Hollywood Authentic, the Harry Potter alum — who took a break from acting after filming 2019’s Little Women — shared that while there are several things she misses about acting, she found promoting her work to be “soul-destroying.”
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“In some ways I really won the lottery [with acting], and what happened to me is so unusual,” Watson said. “But a 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. I think I’ll be honest and straight-forward, 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,” she continued. “The moment you get on a film set, 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.”
Another thing The Bling Ring star said she does not 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,” she admitted.
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Since making her last film, Greta Gerwig’s Little Women, which wrapped in late 2018, Watson has tried her hand at directing and enrolled in a creative writing MA program at Oxford in 2023.
Like in her latest interview with the Hollywood Authentic, the 35-year-old told the Financial Times in 2023 that she found the role of selling a film to be difficult.
“I think I felt a bit caged. The thing I found really hard was that I had to go out and sell something that I really didn’t have very much control over. To stand in front of a film and have every journalist be able to say, ‘How does this align with your viewpoint?'” Watson said at the time.
“It was very difficult to have to be the face and the spokesperson for things where I didn’t get to be involved in the process,” she continued. “I was held accountable in a way that I began to find really frustrating, because I didn’t have a voice, I didn’t have a say. And I started to realize that I only wanted to stand in front of things where if someone was going to give me flak about it, I could say, in a way that didn’t make me hate myself, ‘Yes, I screwed up, it was my decision, I should have done better.'”
When asked if she plans on returning to acting, Watson said, “Yes, absolutely. But I’m happy to sit and wait for the next right thing. I love what I do. It’s finding a way to do it where I don’t have to fracture myself into different faces and people. And I just don’t want to switch into robot mode any more.”
