Is this one of the few times Emma was truly honest in an interview? (mostly)
This is an old interview from 2012. It's been a while since I read it, but only after reading it now do I realize how honest Emma really was here. I believe that we don't really know the real Emma. We know Emmione, the image she wants us to have of her.
She admits here how it was easier to be Emmione than to convince people otherwise and in the years after she really took the image to new heights. Read the full interview here.
We are seated on a velvet brown banquette at a corner table in a grand hotel in New York. Breakfast sits untouched as she stares at her face on the cover of Emma Watson: the Biography. She is dressed in a baggy jumper with her hair pulled back; her young-looking expressive face currently registers anguish. Previous interviews with Watson have portrayed her as a self-possessed, mature young woman who acknowledges her luck and gratitude in abundance. Perhaps, as she will later say, if I'd met her on a different morning, that side of her would have been present.
But there is another side. Someone who remains, despite her best efforts, emotionally overwhelmed by the vibrations of fame.
We had just begun to talk about the hazards of being a private person in a public world when, as a gesture to underline the absurdity of it all, I pulled out of my bag a copy of the unauthorised biography - a book that chronicles how it feels to be Watson, despite the fact she never met the author.
It hit a nerve. She has it in her to laugh it off, but this morning it has elicited a raw and unfiltered response. Tears fill her brown eyes, which remain unblinking and fixated on the cover image of herself. It stares back. She can't look away as she tries to make sense of it. "I read these pages and it has nothing to do with my real life, with who I am. It is a piece of fiction, but that's my face on the cover."
She is holding the book with both hands and turns suddenly defiant. "The first time I saw this book was when I was on the set in New Orleans," she states. "For The End of the World - a movie I just did. This super-cute 11- or 12-year-old girl came up to me and she had pages folded down and she had her special bookmark in it. It looked like she'd been carrying it around for a while. And she really wanted me to sign it. It's really weird that it's not just Hermione who has become someone important to people who love those books, but the idea of who Emma Watson is too."
That she refers to herself in the third person shows how removed she is from her public persona.
Indeed, she says it feels like she has three selves: Fictional Emma, Real Emma, and then the person she happens to be playing at the time. Since the age of nine, that person has been Hermione Granger.
Watson has been a famous person for 13 of her 22 years. Her tearful manner reveals she is not hardened to the realities of it. "I started off at the beginning of the [Harry Potter] series adamantly protecting my own sense of self and my identity as Emma," she says. The book has now been placed, cover down, in the space between us. "I was this nine-year-old who would be sat in these interviews going, 'No, I'm not anything like her, I'm different because of this and this and this - at nine." She sighs.
"People would say, 'You are really Hermione, aren't you?' and it went on and on till it got to a point where I said, fine. It's easier for me to say we're one person because that keeps everyone happy. I'll go with that."
The parallels were convenient to draw. Hermione and Watson were both hard-working, cerebral, academically driven students who aim high, get straight As, and are eager to please. But what separates Watson is that she's an emotional person. She has unresolved and conflicted feelings that surface occasionally, as they have on this morning. "Today is the first day of the craziness," she says, referring to the two weeks of non-stop publicity she has ahead, promoting her latest film, The Perks of Being a Wallflower. "I walk out of my apartment and there are paparazzi there. I'm flying to LA and then Toronto and then New York and back to London - it makes me emotional because it's intense."
Does she have the constitution to be a big movie star? "I've thought about that a lot," she says. "And no, I don't have the constitution to be a big movie star. Or a big celebrity." She pauses. "But I do have the constitution to be a good actress. Some of the stuff is really hard for me. But I really like my job when I'm doing my job. It's just there's this weird blur that's happened between being a celebrity and being an actress."
Okay, she was mostly honest in this interview. About her image at least, and I sympathize with her struggles growing up as a teenager, but I believe she truly enjoyed the fame that came with being an actress.
She looks exasperated. "I was interviewed at 13 or 14, and the journalist said, 'So that means you'd never have to work for money?' and I said yes. The quote was, 'I never have to work for money again,' and that quote has haunted me.
Nah, she was 18 when she said that. X
She shakes her head when I ask if she has any indulgences. "I don't have a need for a lot of money right now. I'm still renting my house. I'm travelling for film work: the studios usually put me up. I still stay at my parents' house. I have my one car - I didn't buy an expensive car because I'm a terrible driver. I'd trash it. So I pay for my phone and my laptop, and I bought a record player - I like records - nice little things like that, but I don't even feel like it [money] is there.
She forgot to mention the ski lodge she bought in 2008. X X
Her schedule is full. At the end of next year she'll begin Beauty and the Beast, and she's talking with the director, Guillermo del Toro, about whom he will cast as the Beast. The project came about when she was sent the script, and she chose del Toro as the director, a mark of her power, stature and taste.
That seems to be Emma's version of what happened. That WB had a script that they sent and that she went to Del Toro with it.
NYtimes 2012: And then I’m doing a film with Guillermo [del Toro] next summer, and I went to him and said Warner Brothers have given me the script for ‘Beauty and the Beast,’ but the only way I’d really want to do it is if you did it. And then miraculously he said, ‘Oh, funnily enough ‘Beauty and the Beast’ is my favorite fairy tale, I can’t let anyone else do this, I’ll start putting a team together.’
But it seems that Del Toro was the one who wrote the script.
From snitchseeker.com June 2012 (From Emma’s Q&A with fans), “Q1 - What’s happening with Beauty and the Beast? Emma: Guillermo del Toro, the director, has just finished editing his last film and is working on the script and pre-production for Beauty and the Beast.”
From Deadline June 2014: EXCLUSIVE: Guillermo del Toro has withdrawn as the director of Beauty, the live-action revisionist take on Beauty And The Beast that has Emma Watson attached to star. Warner Bros has started the process of finding a new director. Del Toro had other commitments, but he’s still firmly part of the movie. He wrote the script, and he’s producing the film with Denise DiNovi. Del Toro is directing the haunted house pic Crimson Peak.
We've discussed all this before of course, but I was bored so...
