Emma Watson appears on the cover of Hollywood Authentic, posing while playing pickleball in Cannes.
Emma Watson hasn’t appeared on the big screen since Greta Gerwig’s Little Women remake in 2019. While she misses acting, she admits that she doesn’t miss the “soul-destroying” aspects of promoting and selling the films she’s been in.
Credit: GREG WILLIAMS / Hollywood Authentic
“In some ways I really won the lottery [with acting], and what happened to me is so unusual,” Watson told Hollywood Authentic in a recent interview.
“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 straightforward, and say: I do not miss selling things. I found that to be quite soul-destroying,” she said.
“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.”
Watson explained that rehearsal time on a project is usually brief, “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,” she told the publication.
Credit: GREG WILLIAMS / Hollywood Authentic
Although she didn’t go into specifics, she hinted that she is “working on something that I’ve never done before,” leaving fans intrigued.
Despite putting her acting career on hold, Emma Watson says she “is maybe the happiest and healthiest I’ve ever been.”
“I think what’s interesting about being an actor is, there’s a tendency to sort of fracture yourself into multiple personalities,” she said. “I’m not just talking about the roles you play, but having the weight of a public persona, that sort of needs constant feeding and sprucing and glamorizing. It’s very energy-intensive stuff. And shedding the multiple identities has freed up so much space, I think, for me to be a better sister, daughter, friend, granddaughter and then artist. And someone who’s trying to do some critical thinking of her own.”
