Emma Watson seems to outshine magazine covers around the world. Now, the Harry Potter series star plays a new role in a ‘Good Girl versus Bad Girl’ shoot for Harper’s Bazaar UK August 2020. The ‘nation’s favourite ingénue’, as the magazine calls her, looks absolutely sensational in a pictorial photographed by Alexi Lubomirski, who managed to perfectly show Emma’s multi-faceted features.
In the cover story, the 21-year-old actress talks about leaving Brown University, Hollywood life, fashion, being the good girl and playing the bad girl. “My acting tutor said the hardest thing for me was to get angry. I almost broke down in tears when they tried to get me to be angry. I said, ‘I just can’t do it.’ – and to let myself be powerful, sexy, all those things, it’s scary for me. [Even playing the bad girl in this shoot] felt a bit uncomfortable and awkward, it didn’t come naturally at all,” she told the magazine.
On the other hand, speaking about being the good girl, Emma confessed in the interview with Harper’s Bazaat that, “There has never been room in my life for that [rebellion] – I couldn’t imagine giving my family any more trouble, it’s already been complicated enough. My dad is one of the top international-communications lawyers in the country, and trying to argue with him was a nightmare, so I learnt quite quickly to be good with words. My mum is an incredible woman. She moved back from Paris with my brother and me after the divorce, and worked full-time, supporting both of us. But I felt I wanted to take care of her – I didn’t want to give her a hard time.”
On Hollywood, Emma admits she feels a little terrified by it. “LA scares the c*** out of me. I feel if I have to work out four hours a day, and count the calories of everything I put in my mouth, and have Botox at 22, and obsess about how I look the whole time, I will go mad, I will absolutely lose it”.
The 21-year-old actress also revealed the reasons for choosing America for her studies and why she left Brown University. “I felt suddenly very claustrophobic… I thought, ‘I can’t stay here [UK], I won’t be able to concentrate, I won’t be left alone’”, Emma explained the decision to come in the US. As for leaving Brown University, the young star admits that, “[Leaving Brown] had nothing to do with bullying, as the media have been suggesting recently. I have never been bullied in my life. Like a lot of other students at Brown, I might spend my third year abroad.”
On not showing her feelings, Emma recalls that besides getting this characteristic from her British roots, she was also inspired by one book she read. “When I was growing up, my family, particularly my father, were very stoic. I learnt that young, very young. Part of me is very resentful of this British mentality that it’s not good to express feelings of any kind – that it’s not proper or brave. But I also appreciate it. There’s another book that I read when I was very young – ‘The Constant Princess’ by Philippa Gregory, about Catherine of Aragon – and I know it sounds silly, but I thought, “I’ve got to be just like her”. She was the first wife of Henry VIII and she survived, having been cruelly divorced. I remember being really inspired by that,” Emma says.
Speaking about the fashion world, the ‘The Perks of Being a Wallflower’ actress says that this can be quite ruthless. “It can be savage and cruel, in that it’s prescriptive – you have to look a certain way and fit a certain mould – but also in the way it’s made. When I went to Bangladesh, to a factory where the clothes are made [for mass market labels], it was horrifying. There is a cost to cheap clothes – if people could see the inhumane way they’re made, they would never in a million years buy them,” Emma told Harper’s Bazaar.
Photos courtesy of Harper’s Bazaar
