Harry Potter star Emma Watson has reflected on her current break from acting, and said that while she misses “the art” of film making, she does not miss promoting movies — a process of “selling things” she found “quite soul-destroying.”
“In some ways I really won the lottery [with acting],” Watson told Hollywood Authentic, “and what happened to me is so unusual. 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.”
The 35-year-old starred in all eight Harry Potter films, released between 2001 and 2011, and in the subsequent decade appeared in a handful of other movies, such as 2012’s The Perks of Being a Wallflower and 2017’s Beauty and the Beast.
Her final role to date was 2019’s Little Women, though Watson has since taken an extended acting break — something she says now was necessary in order to spend more time with her family and friends.
“The most important thing, really — or the foundation of your life — is your home and friends and family,” Watson explained. “I think I worked so hard for so long that my life sort of bottomed out. 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.”
Watson said she was “happy and proud” of her decision to put her acting on hiatus, and said it “felt very courageous at the time.” Since 2019, Watson’s only project has been 2022’s Harry Potter 20th Anniversary: Return to Hogwarts special, where she reunited with Daniel Radcliffe, Rupert Grint and other Wizarding World co-stars to celebrate the franchise’s movies.
“It’s so freeing,” Watson said of acting. “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.”
As for the future, Watson suggested she was working on a project, but couldn’t yet say what it was, as she wasn’t working on a “linear timeline at the moment for anything.”
“I’m good,” she concluded. “Just been working really hard. I’m working on – actually, I’m not going to say what, because then people are like, ‘Well, when is it happening? What’s going on with this thing?’ So I’m just going to say that I’m working on something that I’ve never done before. So I feel a bit like a person who’s in the dark, stumbling around, looking for the edges of something, and hoping [laughs]. It sounds like I’m trying to find a light switch. But it’s good. That’s the process. That’s the process of making things, isn’t it?”
Image credit: Pascal Le Segretain/Getty.
Tom Phillips is IGN’s News Editor. You can reach Tom at tom_phillips@ign.com or find him on Bluesky @tomphillipseg.bsky.social
