Originally appeared on E! Online
Emma Watson felt it was best to take her broomstick far from Hollywood.
Indeed, although the “Harry Potter” star looks back at her work fondly, she shared insight into stepping away from acting to pursue her doctorate, admitting some aspects of the job ultimately took away from the experience.
“In some ways, I really won the lottery [with acting], and what happened to me is so unusual,” Watson told Hollywood Authentic in an interview published Sept. 21. “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,” she continued. “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.”
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For the 35-year-old — who made her acting debut in 1999 with “Harry Potter and the Sorcerer’s Stone” at age 11 — stepping in front of the camera was “so freeing.”
“The moment you get on a film set, you don’t get very long for rehearsal,” she explained. “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.”
With Watson’s last project being “Little Women” in 2019, she admitted, “I miss that profoundly.”
However, she emphasized, “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,” she added. “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.”
Although Watson would consider doing something behind the camera, these days the University of Oxford student is focusing on what really matters to her: her loved ones.
“The most important thing, really — or the foundation of your life — is your home and friends and family,” the “Perks of Being a Wallflower” alum reflected. “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,” she noted. “Some good foundations for anything else to grow from.”
