“What was really nice about working with Laura Dern and Meryl Streep was that the three of us knew each other way before we did Little Women. One of her greatest pleasures in making Little Women, she says, was spending time with fellow actor-activists.
Frankly, who could blame her if she didn’t want to speak to anybody for 10 months, let alone 10 days?ĭespite what looks like the leanings of a closet introvert, she draws strength building communities with people who, like her, are trying to change things. Most interestingly, for someone with a voice as widely heard as hers, she spends 10 days a year at a silent retreat. She loves reading, and famously balanced her career and education for three years while studying English literature at Brown University and Worcester College, Oxford. She smiles and says she splits her time between London and New York (I was shocked to learn that, as a self-confessed “nomad”, she doesn’t have a permanent address), and her hobbies seem to be on the quieter side. It’s rare insight into her notoriously low-key, and otherwise hard to imagine, day-to-day life. “I didn’t think it was possible,” Watson agrees. And what’s really nice is some of my best friends are people I got set up on a date with and it didn’t work out.” That’s very emotionally mature, I say, impressed. “I’m very lucky in the sense that because I went to university and because I’ve done these other things outside of film, my friends are really good at setting me up. “Not one specific person,” she’s keen to clarify, “but I’m going on dates.” So how, in this tricky landscape, does one of the world’s most famous women meet men? “Dating apps are not on the cards for me,” she concedes, and I tell her that, frankly, she’s had a lucky escape.
“I was like, ‘This is totally spiel.’ It took me a long time, but I’m very happy. “I never believed the whole ‘I’m happy single’ spiel,” she continues. If it’s staggering to think that Watson worries about this stuff, it’s comforting, too. “There’s just this incredible amount of anxiety.” If you have not built a home, if you do not have a husband, if you do not have a baby, and you are turning 30, and you’re not in some incredibly secure, stable place in your career, or you’re still figuring things out…” she pauses for breath. And I realise it’s because there is suddenly this bloody influx of subliminal messaging around. “I was like, ‘Why does everyone make such a big fuss about turning 30? This is not a big deal…’ Cut to 29, and I’m like, ‘Oh my God, I feel so stressed and anxious. Which begs the question: what are Emma Watson’s dreams? She turns 30 in April, and describes 2019 as having been “tough”, because she “had all these ideas” about what her life was supposed to look like at this age. And just because my dreams are different from yours, it doesn’t mean they’re unimportant.’” But Meg says, ‘You know, I love him and I’m really happy and this is what I want. To Jo, being married is really some sort of prison sentence. Her choice is that she wants to be a full-time mother and wife. “With Meg’s character, her way of being a feminist is making the choice – because that’s really, for me anyway, what feminism is about. “It’s so bizarre and otherworldly, what happened to me,” she says in that instantly recognisable preppy English accent, alluding, not for the first time in our near-two-hour interview, to the trappings of growing up and existing in the public eye. She was nine years old when she was picked out of a line-up of would-be actors in her school gym to be in a film that would change her life forever. The story of how Watson became one of the most recognisable women on the planet is folklore of sorts. I suppose she’s been watched almost her entire life. We ask for the room to be cleared so we can talk freely, but there are still a dozen or more assistants, stylists and crew hidden behind a wall of light, filming us on camera, still and silent, like the antique bronze cupids posing on the mantelpiece. Ten minutes ago she greeted me with a sisterly hug, and since then I’ve not been able to shake the feeling that we’re at school and about to do the Christmas show together. Emma Watson and I are sitting knee to knee on the plushest sofa in the Royal Suite at The Savoy.
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