There’s been a lot of news about Emma Watson this week, a rare spell for an actress who hasn’t had a new movie since 2019’s Little Women. But that’s largely why her latest interviews are making so much noise as the 35-year-old star of the Harry Potter franchise has opened up on an extended break from Hollywood, how she’s feeling about work these days and addresses her relationship with J.K. Rowling.
In a new cover story for Hollywood Authentic, Watson told her friend and filmmaker Hassan Akkad that she misses the actual work but not what comes after. “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 in the interview, adding that she’s the “happiest and healthiest” than she’s ever been. “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.”
On the heels of the cover story’s publication, Jay Shetty debuted a new episode of his podcast, On Purpose With Jay Shetty, featuring Watson further opening up about a wide variety of subjects including her relationship with J.K. Rowling in the wake of the author’s anti-trans activism, the difficulty of making friendships in Hollywood and the war in Gaza.
Regarding Rowling, Watson said her view is to separate the relationship with the iconic author from her views. “I really don’t believe that by having had that experience and holding the love and support and views that I have mean that I can’t and don’t treasure Jo and the person that I had personal experiences with,” Watson told Shetty. “I will never believe that one negates the other and that my experience of that person, I don’t get to keep and cherish to come back to our earlier thing. I just don’t think these things are either or. It’s my deepest wish that people who don’t agree with my opinion will love me, and I hope I can keep loving people who I don’t necessarily share the same opinion with.”
She applied a similar way of thinking to the war in Gaza. “This duality created where we don’t seem able to care about the victims of terrorism and care about the genocide that’s happening in Palestine at the same time, and both things have to be allowed to be true,” she said. “You have to be allowed to care about 50,000 civilians dying, 17,000 of which are children, and care deeply about the victims of this awful terrorist attack.”
Watson was 11 years old when the first Harry Potter film debuted, and the franchise covered eight films in total. Playing Hermione for as long as she did and growing close to the family of collaborators didn’t translate well to her future projects, explained Watson who went on to star in My Week With Marilyn, The Perks of Being a Wallflower, The Bling Ring, Noah, This is the End and Beauty and the Beast, among others.
“I was coming to those sets with an expectation that I think I had developed on Harry Potter, which was that the people I worked with were going to be my family, and that we were going to be lifelong friends. I came to work looking for friendship, and that was a very painful experience for me, outside of Harry Potter and in Hollywood. Bone-breaking, really painful because most people don’t come to those environments looking for friendships. They’re looking for, this is my chance, this is my role, this is what I want out of it. I’m focused, this is my job, this is my career. Like, let’s go. I was not of that mindset. And so I found the rejection really painful.”
She continued: “It was so unusual to make a set of films for 12 years. We were a community, we really were. I took that as an expectation into my other workplaces, and I just got my ass kicked. I really did. It broke me.”
Shetty and Watson
Courtesy of Jay Shetty
Still, even experiencing such pain, Watson said she’s not ready to throw in the towel on her acting career. “I’ll never say that i’ll quit acting. I’ll always be an actor. I’m still open to doing it again,” she said, with an asterisk. “I don’t feel quite that kind of urgency of needing to do it. It’s also why I’ve had to really navigate my relationship towards art and acting cause I’m pretty sure that I was using acting as a way of escaping how painful…it wasn’t just the divorce, it was just like the continuing situation of living between two different houses and two different lives and two different sets of values.”
