Emma Watson Reveals She's Still Acting Despite 5 Year Hiatus

Little Woman from 2019 was the last movie to star Emma Watson, however, she's opened up about not stepping away from the movie world.

“I don’t see myself as having stepped away from acting. I just see myself as wanting to expand what I do and being able to be in things that I have written or directed or produced.”

She revealed that writing and directing "has been really amazing," and that she began exploring these when she was at home during the COVID pandemic. 

“I just realized how much I loved it and that I wanted to keep doing that. And so I actually study now as well.”

Her directorial debut was back in 2022, with a short film that served as an ad campaign for the Prada Paradoxe fragrance. 

Her next step is to direct something she has written. 

“To direct something that I’d written one day, that would make me pretty excited." 

She doesn't expect she'll be returning to the screen right away though, 

“To really be at the start of a project takes time. Films can be decades in the making, finding it and writing it and putting it together. I don’t see it as a closing down. I see it as an opening up.”

Emma has also focused on the launch of a gin, Renaid, with her brother Alex, as well as her activism for gender equality and sustainability. 

Previously, she's opened up about the fact that she "felt a bit caged" when she took a break from acting, back in 2019. 

“I wasn’t very happy, if I’m being honest." 

“The thing I found really hard was that I had to go out and sell something that I really didn’t have very much control over. To stand in front of a film and have every journalist be able to say, ‘How does this align with your viewpoint?’ It was very difficult to have to be the face and the spokesperson for things where I didn’t get to be involved in the process.”

“I love what I do. It’s finding a way to do it where I don’t have to fracture myself into different faces and people. And I just don’t want to switch into robot mode anymore. Does that make sense?”

One of her biggest projects recently was the Harry Potter 20th Anniversary: Return to Hogwarts special in 2022, which reunited her with Daniel Radcliffe, Rupert Grint, Tom Felton and other Harry Potter castmates. 

Additionally, she penned the forward for Tom Felton's 2022 memoir Beyond the Wand: The Magic and Mayhem of Growing Up a Wizard.

“For more than 20 years now we’ve loved each other in a special way, and I’ve lost count of the times that people have said to me, ‘You must have drunkenly made out, just once!’ ‘You must have kissed!’ ‘There must be something!' But what we have is far deeper than that. It’s one of the purest loves I can think of.”

She concluded this intro by calling Tom a "little piece of my soul.”