In April, Emma Watson turned 35 years old. She also celebrated more than five years away from the movies: The last time we saw her on the big screen was in Greta Gerwig’s adaptation of Little Women, released back in 2019.
Though Watson has been largely away from the spotlight since then, she has kept busy. She started an MA in creative writing at Oxford University in 2023; according to the Daily Mail, university life captivates her so much that she also started a PhD program this year.
Perhaps Watson is making up for lost time. When she finished secondary school, she didn’t immediately enter university because she was committed to filming the last two installments of the Harry Potter series. She took a gap year, then enrolled at Brown University to study English. Watson graduated in five years instead of four because she took two semesters off to film projects like My Week With Marilyn, The Perks of Being a Wallflower, The Bling Ring, This Is the End, and Noah.
This time around, she has taken a complete hiatus from her film career so that it does not interfere with her education. But this is not the only reason she has stepped away from the movies. “I think I felt a bit caged,” Watson told the Financial Times in the spring of 2023, shortly before starting her master’s degree. “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.”
Some months later, in December 2023, she admitted to the British edition of Vogue that she was grateful for the respite she had taken. “I’m just so glad that I did [step away from acting] because I have this feeling of having my own voice and creative space and sovereignty in some way that I don’t think I did before—more autonomy,” she said. “I’m so glad that I allowed things to be messy for a minute and to really allow myself to not know [what’s next], because the knowing that I’ve come to, I wouldn’t trade that for anything.”
Watson used that creative space to make her directorial debut in 2022 with a short film for Prada Beauty’s Paradoxe fragrance campaign; she also wrote the script and acted in it. In 2024, Watson became the face of Prada’s Re-Nylon collection, made solely from nylon taken from the recycling and purification of plastic collected from the sea.
Watson has been committed to sustainable fashion since she was a teenager. In 2009, she was already linked as a creative adviser to People Tree, one of the pioneers of ethical fashion. In 2020, she joined its board of directors. That same year, she also joined the board of directors of Kering, the luxury conglomerate that encompasses Gucci and Yves Saint Laurent, to lead its sustainability committee. Watson was its youngest member at the time.
She left the position in 2023, upon returning to school. That year Watson also began a new and novel business venture alongside her younger brother, Alex, with whom she is close. (He also has a background in fashion; in 2010, he starred in a campaign for Burberry with his sister.) Watson launched her own French-style gin, Renais, recalling her roots: She was born and lived near Paris until her parents divorced when she was five years old.
The gin is made with sustainability in mind, and is very much anchored in the Watsons’ family history. Their father, Chris, has owned vineyards in the Chablis region of Burgundy since the early ’90s, and the siblings spent long periods of their childhood there, even participating in the grape harvest. Similar grapes are key to the character of this premium gin.
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“To me, Renais is a family project; the Chablis region evokes very special memories of growing up. I’ve loved having the opportunity to create something with my brother Alex,” Watson said via a statement published in Wine Spectator. “I’m particularly proud of upcycling grapes from vineyards, including my dad’s, to reduce waste and create something new.”
The packaging is also sustainable. Watson has personally been in charge of the artistic design of its special editions, as she has shown her 73 million Instagram followers. The project is going so well that she and Alex recently received an investment of 5.8 million euros for the international expansion of Renais into more than a dozen countries, including the United States and Spain, where you can already find the gin in specialty stores.
The fiercely private Watson does not share her university life on her social networks, but the Daily Mail recently photographed her taking part in one of Oxford’s great traditions: acting as coxswain on a women’s rowing team. The week before, the same tabloid reported on an alleged lakeside picnic date Watson had with a fellow student. Her last known relationship was with Brandon Green, son of businessman Sir Philip Green—although, again according to the Daily Mail, they broke up in 2023 after just over a year and a half together. Watson has always been proud of her independence, and in fact coined the term “self-partnered.”
The big question is when we will see Watson in the movies again. She reiterated to Vogue last year that her hiatus is not a retirement, and that in the future she sees herself acting in projects that she directs, writes, and/or produces. She also remains close to the industry, as evidenced by her surprise appearance at the Cannes Film Festival in May, an event she hasn’t attended since presenting Sofia Coppola’s The Bling Ring in 2013. The Oxford Mail recently speculated that she is being considered to be the next Bond girl, a role that does not seem to fit precisely with her roadmap. But with a prestigious director like Denis Villeneuve attached to the project, who knows?
Original story in VF Spain.
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