Lovely Emma Watson covers the New York Times T Style Magazine Fashion Fall 2020 issue. The 22-year-old ‘Perks of Being a Wallflower’ actress sat down for a chat with the mag and revealed the reasons she waited this long to make other movies after ‘Harry Potter’. Besides, she discusses fame and shares the best piece of advice her parents gave her.
Watson plays Sam in the ‘Perks of Being a Wallflower’, an adaptation of Stephen Chbosky’s coming-of-age novel. And it seems that talented Emma did a great job when it came to sustaining an American accent. “My grandma said — when I was really young and I’d sing along to the radio — why do you sing in an American accent? I guess it was because a lot of the music I was listening to had American vocalists. And that was something Steve said to me as well: try singing the lines in an American accent. That kind of opened me up. Then I worked with a dialogue coach and I just put in the time to really, really listen and just go over it and over it and over it until I could do it without thinking about it too hard. And I just knew it was really important,” she says.
Asked why she’s waited this long to make other movies after the Harry Potter series, the actress explained that, “I think at first I didn’t because I was always either studying or filming, I didn’t have time to go off and do other films or other things to sort of show people that, Oh, she is not just Hermione, she is an actress and she can go and do these other parts and roles. . . . I didn’t, because I was so focused on, you know, on my GCSEs and on my AS and on my A-levels and then getting in to university and then whatever, I didn’t really have time to do any of that.”
Speaking about Daniel Radcliffe’s performance in Peter Shaffer’s ‘Equus’, Emma says that it was “incredibly brave, and I think people were impressed by his dedication and his work ethic. I mean he did it when he was, like, 17, and that play is dark and demanding and, yeah, and you’ve quite literally got to be ballsy to do it.”
Watson ended up attending Brown University and completed her junior year as a transfer student at Oxford University. “My first two years at Brown weren’t easy, not because I was bullied or because anyone gave me a particularly hard time, but just because, you know, without the collegiate system … and at Brown everyone does completely different things and very much chooses their own path, which is great, but it’s also much more difficult, too. You’re not with a group of people all the time at one time,” the actress confessed in the interview.
In the interview with New York Times, Emma also reveals the best piece of advice she received from her parents. “Yeah, I think I’ve been lucky in that neither of my parents got swept up in it, it wasn’t something they wanted for me, it wasn’t something that they were overawed by. They gave me the best advice they could, and I think they gave me very good advice,” she says. “But my mum particularly said, ‘Right, you’re going to go into these interviews and they’re going to ask you anything they feel like asking you, and every time they ask you a question, think about whether you’d be comfortable discussing it with a stranger.’”
Well, celebrity can be a tricky business. And Watson definitely knows this. “If I went to somewhere busy, I wouldn’t last very long. I can’t go to a museum, I’ll last 10 or 15 minutes in a museum. The problem is that when one person asks for a photograph, then someone sees a flash goes off, then everyone else sort of . . . it’s sort of like a domino effect. And then very quickly the situation starts to get out of control to a point where I can’t manage it on my own,” she explains.
Read Emma Watson’s complete interview in New York Times’ T Style Fall Fashion Issue 2020.
Photos courtesy of NEW YORK TIMES
