Emma Watson said in a new interview with Hollywood Authentic that she is “maybe the happiest and healthiest I’ve ever been” as her acting break nears the seven-year mark. Watson has not acted since December 2018, when she wrapped production on Greta Gerwig’s acclaimed “Little Women” adaptation. The “Harry Potter” star said “having the weight of a public persona” is burdensome, which is why she appears not to be in such a rush to return to Hollywood.
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“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 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.”
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Watson 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. 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.”
While Watson will forever be tied to her role as Hermione Granger in Warner Bros.’ eight “Harry Potter” movies, she continued to earn strong reviews for her non-“Potter” filmography such as “Noah,” “The Bling Ring,” “The Perks of Being a Wallflower,” “Beauty and the Beast” and “Little Women.” The latter two titles were box office blockbusters, with the former surpassing $1 billion worldwide.
“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,” Watson 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 realize you don’t have a rhythm to your life.”
Watson admitted to the Financial Times in a 2023 interview that she “wasn’t very happy” with the acting profession and “felt a bit caged” in by it, which led to her continued hiatus. Outside of appearances as herself in the 2022 TV specials “Pickled” and “Harry Potter 20th Anniversary: Return to Hogwarts,” Watson’s last acting credit is 2019’s “Little Women.”
