Emma Watson

Perhaps most well-known for her role as Hermione Granger in the world-renowned Harry Potter series, Emma Charlotte Duerre Watson rose to prominence as a child actress. But she’s not just known for her role as the book-smart witch—she has also starred as Sam in Stephen Chbosky’s film adaptation The Perks of Being a Wallflower and plays a role in Sofia Coppola’s Bling Ring as well.

But no matter how famous she gets, she always has her family to keep her grounded. “My parents have helped me in terms of keeping my life very down to earth and I’ve tried to live as normally as I can, attending university and creating a life away from my film career,” she says. “Going to university enabled me to define my identity apart from my work and all the attention. When you’re making big movies and being chauffeured everywhere that’s a very strange and isolating kind of life.”

University helped with her role as actress as well. “At university, I enjoyed being treated like everyone else and meeting people who have no interest in celebrities or films or anything like that. That’s been very important to me. You also need to live and be part of the real world if you’re going to grow as an individual and add more layers to your work as an actress,” she states. “I am trying to find roles which define me as a character actress because that’s how I see myself and the type of films I want to make. I learned a lot from my work in The Perks of Being a Wallflower and I think I’ve grown a lot with Bling Ring.”

To prepare for her role, she fully did her research. “I watched a lot of reality TV and material with Kim Kardashian and Paris Hilton and some of the girls from the Hills and gradually put together this picture of who Nikki was and what her psychology was like. I wanted to try to understand how she saw herself and why she was drawn to that kind of celebrity culture. Sofia and I were trying to strike a balance between being funny and entertaining and still being conscious of presenting Nicki as a real person who was part of this wild circle.”

She continues, “I was taking an English course at Brown university (in Providence, Rhode Island) while at the same time watching reality TV. So I found myself in this bizarre situation where I was switching from reading Virginia Wolfe to watching Kim Kardashian! But in some ways I loved that contradiction and immersing myself in this mix of super-high and super-low culture.”

And she loved working with Sofia Coppola. “I’ve been a big fan of Sofia’s for many years and I was so anxious to work with her. She has a very acute perspective on celebrity culture and I am very appreciative of the fact that she writes and directs her films and has a very distinct and uncompromising sensibility. Sofia is a very smart and strong woman and I feel privileged to have had the chance to work with her.”

We wanted to know how Watson balances her celebrity life with her private one. “It’s thrilling in many ways. I’m enjoying everything and trying to take it all in and not feel overwhelmed by it all. I’m also glad that a film like The Bling Ring will help more people see me in a new light and that I can keep being part of projects where people will be surprised at different sides of me. I’m still evolving and learning more about myself and I hope that journey is going to lead to good things,” she reveals.

“Being a celebrity becomes easier to handle — once I accepted it. I feel fortunate in that I’ve never really known what it’s like to have total freedom and anonymity. It’s not like I had it and it was taken away from me. It was something I grew up knowing and a process that happened gradually. I’ve never known anything else, so I guess in a way that’s a blessing.”

“I want to live as normally as possible. Of course, I can’t just go to certain places and hang around too long before people start noticing you and you start signing autographs and soon a crowd gathers around. I’m used to that, though, and I’ve learnt to accept that.”

“For a long time I tried to pretend that I wasn’t really famous and I would try to live as if that were the case. Of course, you very quickly discover that that’s not the case and you have to learn to adjust your life accordingly. But now I’m quite comfortable with it – I just have to be careful!”