Emma Watson, best known as the Hogwarts swot Hermione Grainger, considered giving up acting altogether at the close of the Harry Potter series. For two years, she studied solidly and refused so much as to read a script. The point was "to figure out what I enjoyed, who I was and how I wanted to spend my time," she said yesterday at the Cannes Film Festival. "I considered not being an actress; I considered it all."
"I think this film has scarred me slightly. I see a designer bag and it just weirds me out. "
Clearly, she decided that acting was for her after all. Watson is currently in Cannes promoting The Bling Ring, Sofia Coppola's blistering true-crime film about a group of Los Angeles schoolgirls who robbed the houses of the celebrities they admire. Watson masters a formidably whining Valley Girl accent to play Nicky, who sees her eventual arrest as a promotional opportunity. "Nicky does not think she is going to jail. That is absolutely not entering her head," said Watson. "This is her five minutes of fame; this is her time to brand herself."
Watson has lived with her own celebrity since she was 11, when Harry Potter and the Sorcerer's Stone launched the most successful of all cinema franchises. Unlike Nicky, she describes herself as "quite shy". "She wants to be seen and she dresses to impress, whereas when I'm not working I dress to draw as little attention to 'me' as possible," she said.
She believes she learned a great deal about herself during her two years away from public scrutiny. "You start to accept things in your personality. I think I really used to beat myself up about not wanting to go out, I thought there was something really peculiar about me. But I just gave up trying to fit in so much. I am much more OK with myself now, which is important."
A canny agent lured her back to work, she says, by sending her the script of The Perks of Being a Wallflower as a bit of weekend reading. "And I don't know what it was, but something just clicked and I felt compelled to get the film made."
Then along came Sofia Coppola's script, which spoke to her own experience. "No one really makes films about the underbelly of this industry and what it's like to be a real human being in it. I live that. I think that is why Sofia and I connected, that we both understand that."
The Facebook generation has unprecedented access to the rich and famous, she observed during the press conference that followed the film's first Cannes screening.
"We are becoming saturated with images. They can embody whatever they [fans] project onto that image, so in a sense people really feel invested, feel connected to that person and that world." But these images, she cautioned, have little to do with reality. "It's a narrative that our society and culture has really become obsessed with."
Despite being part of that narrative, she found Los Angeles "like an alien planet" when she first went there. "I mean, I grew up in the countryside in a small town in England. It really is just like polar opposites."
If anything, working on The Bling Ring has only confirmed her sense that she belongs to a different world. "I think the film has scarred me slightly," she said. "I just see a designer bag and – I can't even carry one any more. It just weirds me out."
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