Emma Watson has not appeared on the big screen since Greta Gerwig’s remake of Little Women in 2019, but while she misses acting, she does not miss the “soul-destroying” process of promoting and selling the films she has starred in.
“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.”
She said rehearsal time on a project tends to be short, “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.
Watson wouldn’t elaborate, but she also mentioned she was “working on something that I’ve never done before,” so stay tuned.
And despite putting her acting career on hold, she said 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.”
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