![](\"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/ie\/wp-content\/uploads\/2025\/09\/d5416f3384008549f56dbdcb72580fd58c-Emma-Watson-Jay-Shetty.rhorizontal.w700.jpg\")
<\/p>\n <\/p>\n
\n Her conversation with Jay Shetty is as long as most Harry Potter films.
\n Photo: Jay Shetty Podcast\/YouTube\n <\/p>\n
Is Emma Watson still famous? She hasn\u2019t appeared on the big screen since Little Women in 2019, but whether or not she is a celebrity, or even an actor, has been the subject of focus ever since. Watson has nothing new coming out \u2014 she still hasn\u2019t acted, let alone directed or written anything \u2014 but in the past week, she has had two interviews promoting, well, not doing promotional work. Her anti-press-tour press tour promotes one thing and one thing only: Emma Watson.<\/p>\n
\u201cI\u2019m just showing up today for myself, and for once I\u2019m not showing up to speak on behalf of anyone or anything else other than myself,\u201d she tells podcast host Jay Shetty on his podcast, On Purpose<\/a>. She said something to the same effect to her friend Hassan Akkad in Hollywood Authentic<\/a>. \u201cI do not miss selling things. I found that to be quite soul-destroying. But I do very much miss using my skill-set, and I very much miss the art. I just found I got to do so little of the bit that I actually enjoyed,\u201d she explained. Neither is quite an \u201cI\u2019m telling MY story for once\u201d type of interview (despite the big capital letters Shetty\u2019s team put over the YouTube still), but rather Watson is reflecting on the past six years of her life outside the public eye. What she has been up to is realizing how much doing a press tour is the type of thing she can\u2019t really sustain, but she only knows how to express that idea through doing a press tour.<\/p>\n There\u2019s a degree of cognitive dissonance to Watson\u2019s explanation in these conversations: She\u2019s clearly selling something, but it\u2019s not a film or even her artisanal gin she works with her brother<\/a> on. Instead, she\u2019s promoting a kind of self-awareness she has not often shown \u2014 she\u2019s confessing, perhaps later than one would expect, that her life is nuts. She knows her life is nuts. And part of why she stepped away from the world of acting was to process how nuts it is to be an actor, a famous person, and a public figure. \u201cEven being the person who was promoting the work became a kind of role. Like, \u2018Emma Watson\u2019 became this avatar, this person I identified with but also didn\u2019t,\u201d she confesses to Shetty.<\/p>\n Beyond her distaste for selling a film, part of what Watson says became her breaking point was having to do press around the personal relationships she developed while working on movies. She was spoiled, she admits, by the interpersonal dynamics on the Harry Potter films, where everyone was encouraged to think as though they were a family. While Watson doesn\u2019t name a particular film that made her feel rejected as a person by her castmates, one could consider Little Women \u2014 her last film \u2014 the point of no return. She explains to Shetty that part of what became stressful and \u201cbone-breakingly painful\u201d was having to maintain an illusion of camaraderie where there was none. She explains, \u201cYou have to pretend that you\u2019re all best friends, and I think people wish that they were. Having to pretend that something exists that you really want but don\u2019t have is pretty grainy in the wound.\u201d She chokes up telling this story but admits she is happy to be able to recognize that something was wrong and go forward and fix it.<\/p>\n So what has she been working on? She refuses to name any particular project when speaking with Akkad. (She tells him that she has \u201cjust been working really hard on \u201csomething she\u2019s never done before.\u201d) It\u2019s possible that she\u2019s referring to the writing she\u2019s been doing in her first year of her master\u2019s program in creative writing at Oxford: writing a play about, well, being Emma Watson. \u201cIt\u2019s about me transitioning from being a full-time actress and activist to try to move home and be a normal student and attend a normal university as a super-famous person,\u201d she says. Watson performed the play for her family and friends and even sends it to people she goes on dates with (or new friends) in order to make sense of her whole deal.<\/p>\n What becomes apparent over the course of Shetty\u2019s podcast in particular is that Watson\u2019s strengths are increasingly not in the film industry, where she embodies anything but herself. On the surface, complaining about the notion of a press tour feels like Champagne problems, but she has been at this since she was 9. Speaking for herself now, as an adult in her mid-30s, Watson is so much more compelling than she ever was onscreen; she\u2019s funnier and more vulnerable than she\u2019s ever been as a character. It\u2019s possible that after all this time, her most fascinating contribution to the world of art is her ability to admit how impossible doing all of this is \u2014 her failures are far more interesting than her victories. This is never more apparent than when, at the start of the episode, she addresses her license being suspended through tears of laughter<\/a>. (\u201cIt was on the BBC,\u201d she groans.) She doesn\u2019t sugarcoat the experience but instead cops to her inability to drive herself around at the speed limit. \u201cI had days where I wanted to turn to people and say, \u2018I used to be good at things!\u2019 It just doesn\u2019t look like it right now.\u201d Watson\u2019s still good at telling a story, especially when she gets to write the ending herself.<\/p>\n Related<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"Her conversation with Jay Shetty is as long as most Harry Potter films. Photo: Jay Shetty Podcast\/YouTube Is…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":83325,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[268],"tags":[55466,434,435,18,20957,117,19,1915,17,55463,327,5,55464,1113,55467,55468,55465,16007],"class_list":{"0":"post-83324","1":"post","2":"type-post","3":"status-publish","4":"format-standard","5":"has-post-thumbnail","7":"category-celebrities","8":"tag-celeb-tell-alls","9":"tag-celebrities","10":"tag-celebrity","11":"tag-eire","12":"tag-emma-watson","13":"tag-entertainment","14":"tag-ie","15":"tag-interview","16":"tag-ireland","17":"tag-jay-shetty","18":"tag-movies","19":"tag-news","20":"tag-on-purpose-with-jay-shetty","21":"tag-podcasts","22":"tag-press-tour","23":"tag-self-promo-as-self-care","24":"tag-tell-all","25":"tag-vulture-homepage-lede"},"share_on_mastodon":{"url":"","error":""},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/83324","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=83324"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/83324\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/83325"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=83324"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=83324"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=83324"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}