Emma Watson hasn't been on the big screen since 2018 — and now she's explaining why.
After Emma appeared in Little Women that year, she decided to take a step back from acting because she realized she just wasn't happy.
"I wasn’t very happy, if I’m being honest," Emma recently told the Financial Times. "I think I felt a bit caged."
Looking back, Emma says it became hard for her to take part in projects where she didn't have much of a say in the creative process.
"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," Emma explained.
She continued, "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."
Emma says she began to be "held accountable" in a way that she found "really frustrating" because she "didn’t have a voice" or "a say."
"I started to realize that I only wanted to stand in front of things where if someone was going to give me flak about it, I could say, in a way that didn’t make me hate myself, 'Yes, I screwed up, it was my decision, I should have done better,'" Emma shared.
And while Emma is focusing on other things right now, like a gin brand she's crafting with her family, she says she will return to acting one day.
"Yes, absolutely. But I’m happy to sit and wait for the next right thing," Emma said. "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," she concluded.
