Even If Emma Watson Retires From Acting, She’ll Always Be A Role Model

Last week, the news surfaced that electronic music legends Daft Punk had officially broken up, an announcement somewhat anticlimactic for a group more than half a decade out from their last studio album. Though sad, it felt more pro forma than anything else, like a simple notification that their recent track record of no new music would continue indefinitely. A similar feeling of redundancy accompanied a rumor cropping up around this exact same time, that one-time Harry Potter star Emma Watson had “secretly retired” from acting at age thirty. My sister texted me that morning, reasoning that “it’s easy to stop doing something you weren’t doing anyway, that’s how she was able to retire in secret.” I reminded her that Watson graced the silver screen a little over a year ago in Little Women, but she’d articulated something true all the same. It does feel slightly off-base to think of Watson as an active, working actress.

Her PR team was quick to dispel the murmurings, and yet the food for thought had already been served: as a public persona, who is Emma Watson, really? She doesn’t work much for someone presumably offered every role under the sun, accepting an average of one gig per year, with some years doubled up and some fully taken off. At the height of her fame, she back-burnered her career so she could get a good education as an undergrad at Brown. When she does go Hollywood, she balks at the ceremonial pomp that comes with it, having deferred much of the Little Women press tour. “She’s way more like a real person than a movie star” is how Watson’s good pal Gloria Steinem described her in a 2017 Vanity Fair profile, a quotation as telling for its context as for its content.

Few performers define themselves as much by their other work, with Watson taking constant, vocal pride in her activism for the feminist cause. She’s advanced from a UN Goodwill ambassadorship in support of the HeForShe equality campaign to an advisory position for a G7 gender equality committee in 2019. Just last year, she spearheaded a project intended to rename the 270 stops of the London Underground after great women and non-binary people of UK history. And who could forget that one time she left books around the New York subway for people without regard for germs or sanitation to ostensibly take home, in promoting literacy or maybe just whimsical living? She’s always aspired to role-model-hood, even if she claims the very thought “puts the fear of god” into her.

That same spirit of do-gooder mindfulness has also informed the choices making up her filmography, which suggest a more judicious logic than her bill-paying, food-on-the-table-putting peers can afford to follow. One gets the sense Watson has never signed on for a movie she didn’t feel in her bones, just for the sake of keeping busy or fattening her bank account. Across the ten roles she’s taken in the decade since getting off the Harry Potter crazy train, a few throughlines emerge — literary adaptations, self-commentary, adventurous collaborations. But the prevailing trend is a consistent sense of importance, a vow that Emma Watson can not simply do a movie. Each new entry in her C.V. allows her to make a statement, just not quite as directly as in her humanitarian work.

The Harry Potter pictures bisect her screen work, and her adulthood with it; she’s been in movies for twenty years, half spent at Hogwarts corresponding almost exactly with her teen years, and half in more mature projects carrying her through her twenties. Though she grew as a thespian more noticeably than costars Daniel Radcliffe or Rupert Grint during their stint in magic-world, her post-Potter years gave the impression of an re-arrival, a young talent ready to introduce herself as a grown-up. That impetus to prove herself hasn’t faded as her acting résumé has expanded, each new role meant to show some unanticipated side of her personality or skill set.

After getting her feet wet with a small supporting part in My Week with Marilyn, a reflection on the pressures heaped upon young women by the demands of fame that Watson must have gibed with on some level, she cherrypicked The Perks of Being a Wallflower for her Phase II debut. The de facto successor to Catcher in the Rye, Stephen Chbosky’s adaptation of his own bildungsroman novel foregrounds what English teachers might call “difficult themes” of drug use, self-harm, queer sexuality, and depression. As the cool-yet-troubled Sam, she’s the idealized guide through this unfamiliar terrain of adolescence for unsure protagonist Charlie, holding his hand through his first kiss and his first acid trip. Watson gamely lends herself to the teen-boy desire fantasies her dialogue invites, showing us that she can be the artsy, pseudo-deep crush object Hermione never ran the risk of being.

2013 dealt her a pair of projects demonstrating a surprising measure of self-awareness for someone later quoted as saying of an eventual marriage proposal, “Stuff the engagement ring! Just build me a really big library.” Her lifelong cornball tendencies took a brief hiatus with her leading role in Sofia Coppola’s The Bling Ring and a cameo as herself in the apocalypse-comedy This Is the End, both of which posed her as a foil for the Watson known to moviegoers. In Coppola’s recounting of a string of Beverly Hills robberies carried out by vapid fame obsessives, she portrayed the bubblehead ringleader, an ironically played product of the celebrity industrial complex Watson had studiously avoided. Putting on a nasal American accent for maximum obnoxiousness, she gave America the sexy starlet their culture demands, and kept pushing through to reveal the vacuum inside her. When she states during a press conference, “I want to lead a country one day, for all I know,” it’s a chilling declaration of intent. On the character, it’s a tough look to pull off, but Watson has spent much of her real life convincing people to take that very ambition seriously.

In This Is the End, she’s one of the surviving stragglers in an Armageddon scenario that’s driven Seth Rogen, James Franco, Jonah Hill, and other assorted pals to hole up in a mansion and see how long they can last. She busts in and considers joining their band, only to have second thoughts when she overhears the guys discussing what she mistakenly believes are plans to rape her. The comedy comes from what happens next, as she beats the hell out of them and jacks their precious resources. (“So, Hermione took all our shit…”) But there’s also a valid point buried in there somewhere, about how the media and general public consider young actresses fair game for sexual discussion that easily assumes an intense optic ugliness. Even when cutting loose, Watson was still guided by a lucid sense of purpose.

Her films in the coming years, while eclectic, were organized around her crystallizing reputation as a self-styled intellectual and A-lister of substance. She partook in Noah, Darren Aronofsky’s high-minded rework of Biblical epics, and the Chilean-Revolution-set thriller Colonia the year after. Even with her most seemingly surface-level project, the 2015 horror flop Regression, she made sure to emphasize that though the film “had all the components of a psychological thriller/movie, it has a deeper layer to it.” It would go against her nature to select a script because the shoot sounded like a fun time, or because the money was good.

2017 brought another literary adaptation, a limp take on Dave Eggers’ techno-parable The Circle, as well as a more significant headlining showcase in Disney’s live-action remake of Beauty and the Beast. This would seem to break the trend, as a mainstream studio production recycling a fable read by feminist scholars as the story of a woman coming to accept and love a violent, unpredictable man holding her hostage. An undeterred Watson emphasized the first-act characterization of princess Belle, which sees her trumpeting her love of reading and capably caring for her older father. Speaking on Good Morning America, she did image rehab for her fictional counterpart: “She is a little different. I think we had a little bit more space and more room to tell a bit more of Belle’s story in this one. I hope she’s a slightly more modern version… She was updated a little bit, but she was pretty progressive in her DNA, really. She was a bit of a rebellious Disney princess.”

The disingenuousness of that soundbite starts to tease out the distaste for Watson rampant in some corners of the internet. (My sister, for one, numbers among their rank.) Earnest to a fault, she can’t help but think of acting in the same terms as her activism work, always elevating even the most commercial material to the level of service. Her supporters see this as modeling commendable behaviors, but her detractors perceive this stance as considering mere movie stardom beneath her. This goes back to the initial question of her “retirement,” overstated as it may have been; like Jay Z, she can freely flit in and out of the industry that brought her worldwide fame as she pursues the other interests that threaten to eclipse her primary talent. She doesn’t need to retire. As is, she comes and goes as she pleases.

Charles Bramesco (@intothecrevassse) is a film and television critic living in Brooklyn. In addition to Decider, his work has also appeared in the New York Times, the Guardian, Rolling Stone, Vanity Fair, Newsweek, Nylon, Vulture, The A.V. Club, Vox, and plenty of other semi-reputable publications. His favorite film is Boogie Nights.