24 Sep - Despite missing acting, Emma Watson recently admitted that she does not miss at all everything else that comes with it. The "Harry Potter" actress, who has been on a Hollywood break for the past seven years, said that the process of promoting the films she was in was "soul-destroying." "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 said. Speaking about acting, Watson said that she instead enjoyed the acting process itself.
"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. It's so freeing. I miss that profoundly," she said.
As for her break, which came after Greta Gerwig's "Little Women" in 2019, Watson said that she is the happiest and healthiest she has ever been. She explained, "I think 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 glamorizing. 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 artiste. And someone who's trying to do some critical thinking of her own."