Emma Watson hasn’t appeared in a movie since 2019’s Little Women. There are two reasons for this. The first: she earned gobs (goblets?) of money from playing Hermione in the Harry Potter series, enough to buy a little town full of little people. The other explanation is that Watson “wasn’t very happy” with the profession, as she revealed in an interview with the Financial Times.
“I wasn’t very happy, if I’m being honest,” she said. “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?’ 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.” Watson continued:
“I was held accountable in a way that I began to find really frustrating, because I didn’t have a voice… 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 would return to acting, Watson replied, “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 anymore.”
She probably won’t break her hiatus with the Harry Potter show (for many reasons).
(Via the Financial Times)