Emma Watson: From Actor to Ambassador

Emma Watson is one of our generation’s most renowned actors. Not only have we watched her literally grow up on screen through the decade-long span of the Harry Potter movies, but we’ve also seen a variety of her movie roles as well as shifts in her career from an actor to a college student at Brown University to a United Nations goodwill ambassador. In order to be such a versatile artist, Watson has allowed her creative process to grow and evolve as she has. 

In many interviews, Watson talks about how her audition for Hermione was her very first audition ever — I don’t think there’s another actor with such luck as she has. Because she played the role of Hermione during such a critical time in her childhood, she often says she sees a lot of similarities between herself and the character. In a TIME interview, she said, “I feel as though I spent a long time trying to pretend I was not like Hermione. … And, of course, I was rather like Hermione; I’ve finally come to accept the fact.” It seems to me a lot of her creative process in this role came from tapping into her own personal experiences, and really trying to become Hermione herself. In an interview where she was talking about what it was like to kiss Harry Potter co-star Rupert Grint, she said it was definitely weird to be kissing such a close friend of hers, so she really had to imagine the situation as Hermione kissing Ron Weasley. It sounds like a big part of her creative process is mental imagery, where she really tries to imagine herself as a character to be able to give the most genuine performance. 

Watson has also said uses art as a way of introspection, to be able to find out things about herself. In an interview with Rookie Magazine, Watson said, “Playing Nicki in The Bling Ring gave me such insight into myself — parts of me that I’m uncomfortable with, or that I don’t like. I realized through playing her that I can be so judgmental in a way that I wish I wasn’t. And I found things that I had in common with her, which was difficult as well.” It seems like she motivated in her art not only by an intrinsic love of the work, but also extrinsically by the reward of self-reflection and self-discovery. She also categorized herself as a collector. She said in the same magazine, “I’ve always kept and collected things, and I’ve always been interested in the idea of diaries. I must have 10 different personal diaries. …  They’ve given me a place where I can try to figure myself out, because those kinds of ideas feel too personal. … It allows me to get things out of my head and work them out in a way that feels safe, which is really helpful.” She uses the tidbits from her collection of journals to hone her introspection and help her refine her creativity. 

Furthermore, some of Watson’s creative works sounds like they came to her naturally — arguably by a stroke of insight. In one case, when she first read the script for the film The Perks of Being a Wallflower in which she played the role of Sam, she told the Rookie magazine interviewer: “nothing had really resonated with me in the same way. It was just on my brain, it was on my mind, I couldn’t stop thinking about it.” She went onto describe how much the film sparked her creativity in the role. It’s clear to me as soon as she found out about the movie, it wasn’t even a question of whether or not she wanted to do it, she just knew it felt right. 

Similarly, Watson has lately stepped outside the bounds of acting to pursue a different realm of creativity — education and activism. In the summer of 2014, Watson was given the title of a UN Women Goodwill Ambassador, meaning someone who advocates for a certain cause — in her case, that cause is feminism and women’s rights. Watson launched a campaign called He for She, in which she is trying to motivate boys and men, and well as girls and women, to advocate for women’s rights. From childhood actress to international activist, Watson has greatly stepped out of her original domain. She has used the experiences of her past creatives in order to launch forward a project that is expected to have widespread ramifications. Because of this transcendence, I would call Watson a Big C creative because of how pervasive her creative works are. Not only are her movies some of the most well-known films of this century, but she’s also managed to work her way to the highest stage in the international political arena.