Until she restarted her on-again, off-again feud with Harry Potter creator JK Rowling last week, you would be forgiven for thinking that Emma Watson had fallen off the face of the earth.
The original Hermione Granger has kept a deliberately low profile for years, occasionally popping up in perfume adverts or at a film festival, but generally shunning the limelight.
The 35-year-old has “just been working really hard” of late, she told Hollywood Authentic magazine in a rare interview in September. Like the character she played on screen for a decade, Watson comes across as something of a neurotic swot: she is currently completing a DPhil (PHD) in creative writing at Oxford University, having matriculated at Lady Margaret Hall in September 2023, and has been coxswain for the women’s third rowing team at New College.
Watson previously graduated with an English literature degree from Rhode Island’s Brown University in 2014, but took five years to complete her studies as she missed whole semesters while she did acting jobs.
Stuck in Hermione Granger mode?
By her telling, taking the postgraduate degree as an older student has been a voyage of self-discovery. For one of her assignments, Watson wrote a one-woman play “about me transitioning from basically being a full-time actress, an activist, to trying to move home and be a normal student and attend a normal university as a super famous person”.
She told the podcaster Jay Shetty that her piece, which she only wrote “because I find that trying to explain sometimes how weird it is to be me, I almost need aids. It’s so difficult to convey how weird it is and how surreal sometimes”, was awarded a distinction.
“I’m so glad I went and did this creative writing Master’s, and I’ve spent more time writing about my experiences because sometimes I can’t even articulate it to myself,” she added. “How are you supposed to explain something to someone else that you can’t really even understand for yourself?”
The traditional campus life is not for her, however, and she is said to live in a £4m mansion in Jericho, the city’s affluent northern suburb that is equipped with a sauna and hot tub, and she has been spotted going wild swimming nearby. Watson is a regular in Oxford pubs, where she can be heard opining on feminism and other meaty topics, while she has also become known for hosting dinners for her fellow students.
She has enthused about how her favourite aspect of university life is “being around young people who still believe that the world is malleable and things are changeable… it’s been wonderful to be around young people and just to sit there and listen, frankly”.
Watson seems like she is stuck in Granger mode more than a decade after she stopped playing the character: the eternal student. It is all the more remarkable, given that her first experiences of higher education at Brown are not ones she relished.
“On the first day, I walked into the canteen and everyone went completely silent and turned around to look at me,” she told The Sunday Times in 2014. “I had to say to myself, ‘It’s OK, you can do this.’ You just have to take a deep breath and gather your courage. I have moments where I walk into a bar and it will take me making a joke to put people at ease, to realise I am just a girl.”
At her graduation that year, Watson was protected by an armed undercover bodyguard, complete with her own cap and gown, who was reportedly paid £90,000 a year. She seems to have been able to shake off some of those strictures today, at least.
Though she professes to be delighted with her academic lifestyle, the present Watson comes across like the Duchess of Sussex, another middling actress who has turned her face against the discipline that made her rich and famous and speaks now as if they have swallowed a library’s worth of flimsy self-help books. She made a play at being an activist for a while, such as her high-profile UN speech about women’s rights in 2014, but is much less prominent in that sense now.
“What’s interesting about being an actor is, there’s a tendency to sort of fracture yourself into multiple personalities. I’m not just talking about the roles you play, but having the weight of a public persona, that sort of needs constant feeding and sprucing and glamorising,” Watson told Shetty. “It’s very energy-intensive stuff. And shedding the multiple identities has freed up so much space, I think, for me to be a better sister, daughter, friend, granddaughter, and then artist. And someone who’s trying to do some critical thinking of her own.” She has the words “I am an artist” written on her bedroom door.
Podcasts, pickleball and a speeding ticket
Despite her stated desire for privacy, Watson has provided clues about how she spends her time, given that she has so much money in the bank that she need not work again if she doesn’t want to. She told Shetty that she listens to podcasts “first thing in the morning when I’m taking my shower or I’m going on my walk or I’m making my breakfast. It’s really personal, intimate time”.
Watson also has a habit of listening to songs on repeat, and revealed in the Hollywood Authentic interview that she has had Brandi Carlile’s You Without Me on loop recently. “It gives me chills every time I listen to it. So that’s the song today that I’ve been playing while I’ve been working on my essay.”
Like so many of her peers, Watson has also become a devotee of pickleball and was photographed playing the sport for Hollywood Authentic. “It’s the sound the ball makes when you smack it; it’s the best therapy I never paid for.”
Watson has never married – though she has had a string of public relationships, including with Brandon Green, the son of the former retail tycoon Sir Philip Green – and once described herself as being “self-partnered”. She said that if she had wed at any point before “about a year ago” it would have been “carnage” because she “just didn’t know [herself] well enough yet”.
The erstwhile actress is, by her own admission, not a great driver. She got a six-month driving ban, and a £1,044 fine, in July after travelling at 38mph in a 30mph zone; it came after her Audi S3 was towed after parking illegally in Stratford-upon-Avon in February last year. “I recently started riding a bicycle, and yes, I started riding a bicycle before my driving ban, but now it’s particularly fortuitous,” she told Shetty. “I also ride a bicycle for that reason.”
Her reaction to seeing the story plastered over news sites was: “My shame is everywhere.” She has blamed her cosseted life as an actress, which saw her ferried around by chauffeur-driven cars, as a reason for her inability to follow traffic rules herself.
Drumming up publicity
Watson has come across as an eccentric, even paranoid, character in previous years. In 2017, she told Vanity Fair that she bought a house sight-unseen on a video call because it had what was described as a “paparazzi-proof” entrance and “privacy for me is not an abstract idea”. The same year, she revealed that she had an unusual way of de-stressing. “I have a bath every single day of my life. And if I can have two or three – amazing. Nothing terrible is going to happen in the bath, so I always find time for that. I’ll take phone conversations in the bath, anything.”
Watson has not entirely foresworn her previous life. She put in a fleeting appearance at the Cannes Film Festival in May, because she “just wanted to go and watch films” and has starred in adverts for Prada’s Paradoxe fragrance.
Part of the reason that she has not acted since playing Meg March in Greta Gerwig’s 2019 adaptation of Little Women is because of the constant need to drum up publicity for films. “I think I’ll be honest and straightforward, and say: I do not miss selling things,” she told Hollywood Authentic. “I found that to be quite soul-destroying.”
For someone who abhors promoting their work and flogging products, she seems to do an awful lot of it. As well as starring in and directing Prada perfume adverts, she also helps her younger brother, Alex, hawk his gin brand. Watson is a shareholder in Renais, and she told the Financial Times when it launched in 2023 that she was overseeing the brand’s design because “it would have hurt my soul if it had been done in a way that didn’t feel personal”.
But selling her brother’s gin appears not to be the height of Watson’s ambition and, horror, she seems to be threatening to make a comeback in the entertainment world. “I’m working on… actually, I’m not going to say what, because then people are like, ‘Well, when is it happening? What’s going on with this thing?’ So I’m just going to say that I’m working on something that I’ve never done before,” she told Hollywood Authentic. “So I feel a bit like a person who’s in the dark, stumbling around, looking for the edges of something, and hoping.”