Emma Watson says she took an acting hiatus after realizing: "I didn't have a voice"
Emma Watson, who hasn't acted in a project since 2019's Little Women, says she "felt a bit caged" as an actor
Between the Harry Potter series, The Perks Of Being A Wallflower, and The Bling Ring, it’s not a stretch to say that Emma Watson’s body of work serves as the perfect microcosm for a certain disillusioned but romantic post-internet generation (of which this writer is a proud member). Yet despite everything she offered Hollywood, Watson didn’t always feel like she got much back, a persistent experience that ultimately led her to step away from acting for a time.
Today, it’s been nearly five years since Watson took a new role—she was last seen in Greta Gerwig’s 2019 adaptation of Little Women. Looking back on her choice to take a hiatus from performance in a recent interview with The Financial Times, Watson recalls realizing she “wasn’t very happy” as an actor.
“I think I felt a bit caged,” she recalls. “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.”
She continues: “I was held accountable in a way that I began to find really frustrating, because I didn’t have a voice, I didn’t have a say… I started to realize that I only wanted to stand in front of things where if someone was going to give me flak about it, I could say, in a way that didn’t make me hate myself, ‘Yes, I screwed up, it was my decision, I should have done better.’”
During her hiatus, Watson has focused on philanthropic work and personal business pursuits—right now, she’s fresh off launching a premium gin with her younger brother, Alex. Fraught relationship with the industry aside, Watson asserts that she will “absolutely” return to acting when it feels right; in the meantime, she’s just “happy to sit and wait for the next right thing.”
“I love what I do,” Watson explains. “It’s finding a way to do it where I don’t have to fracture myself into different faces and people. And I just don’t want to switch into robot mode any more. Does that make sense?” With the phrase “robot mode” feeling more and more applicable to creatives every day, Watson’s logic is pretty airtight.