[Gallery] [Fashion] [Version française]
Transcript by EmmaWatson-Updates.com:
Cover look.
"It's like nothing I've done before!" says Emma of her Teen Vogue cover shoot at New Jersey's Asbury Park boardwalk. (Well, it's a little like something she's done before - this is Emma's fourth cover!) The actress braved the chilly March weather like a pro, arriving with a smile and Sprinkles cupcakes in tow. While posing alongside the Jersey beach and glamming it up in the historic Paramount Theatre, the Hollywood darling rocked out to Haim and asked to crank up the volume for Robyn's "Dancing on My Own". Emma describes the edgy shoot: "It's a tomboyish style that felt slightly like Brighton in England." We last saw Emma gracing Teen Vogue's cover in August 2009 on British soil, when she was filming Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows: Part 1. "It feels like forever ago, almost like another lifetime," she says of her wizarding days. "It's kind of amazing to think about everything I've done and how much I've changed since then." We'll wave our wands to that!
We love it when a classic beauty takes risks. Enter Emma, who was totally game to be transformed by makeup artist Francelle and hair guru Shon for her cover shoot. "It's cool, a little undone, and a bit rock'n'roll," explains Francelle of her look. Keeping the focus on Emma's mahogany eyes, Francelle rimmed her lids with liquid liner in a charcoal gray, rather than black, for softer definition. She topped them off with a coat of mascara and dusted rosy blush on her cheeks. Then Shon teased Emma's strands at the roots to build height and smoothed the crown over a ponytail. He finished with tiny braids on each side to create the effect of a punky undercut.
The face of Lancôme was so excited by the androgynous look our beauty team dreamed up that she insisted on leaving our set with her makeup and hair intact. Francelle says, "She walked out like, 'I'm going to rock this!"
Breaking bad.
Emma Watson toughens up, from an edgy new role in The Bling Ring to her no-nonsense take on dealing with fame.
One thing about Emma Watson: She has never been arrested. Nor, so far as anyone knows, has she ever eloped, been kicked off a movie set, or unleashed an angry rant on Twitter. Under normal circumstances, none of this would be particularly noteworthy. But Emma, 23, doesn't live under normal circumstances, and she hasn't for a very long time. Instead, the Paris-born, Oxford-raised actress is a self-made young Hollywood success, and more to the point, she is exceedingly famous thanks to a decision she made when she was only nine (and, of course, the dozen-odd years of hard work that followed).
"I think, in a way, I was very protected during Harry Potter, because I was working all the time," Emma muses, taking a sip of tea. Dressed in a pair of dusky gray jeans, two layered cotton T-shirts, and a chic black blazer, she's sitting in the corner of a posh but deserted hotel restaurant on Manhattan's Upper East Side, open just so we can conduct the interview for her fourth Teen Vogue cover. "I would get in the car, go to the studio, and go home," she says. Whenever possible, she continued to attend school and hang out with her childhood friends.
As a result, Emma explains, it took an improbably long time for her to understand how unusual her existence had become. It wasn't until she enrolled at Brown University, in 2009, that she began to grasp the enormity of her renown. "It sounds stupid," she admits, "or completely unbelievable, but that was when I really realized that I was famous. There are still days when I deal with it horribly and there are days when I deal with it really well." She felt as though everything had been "turned upside down."
It was during this period that Emma told Teen Vogue she didn't have "a burning passion" for acting and that she wasn't even sure she'd continue to do it once she'd wrapped the final Potter film. "I know. Crazy!" she exclaims when reminded of that statement now. "I think I just needed a little bit of time to let the dust settle. I wanted to take a few years away so I could see how I felt about it with some perspective and a little bit of distance. I also wanted to get my studies somewhat under way. And," she adds with a hint of a smile, "it gave me an easy out."
Not that she ended up needing one: Emma won her first significant post-Potter part just a year later in The Perks of Being a Wallflower, which was released last fall. "I think that was really what changed things for me," she says. Writer-director Stephen Chbosky became "an instant friend, really a kindred spirit," she says, and "making that movie was such an incredible experience. Everything just sort of fell into place really beautifully."
Actor Logan Lerman, who starred opposite Emma in Perks (and will again in next year's Noah), agrees that the atmosphere on set was especially warm; he still considers Emma a good friend. "We all clicked," he recalls. "My first impression of her, and it was a long-lasting impression, is that she's a hardworking, smart, to-the-point kind of girl. She knows what she wants, and she's good at what she does because of that." It was the actress's first time doing an American accent, and Logan says she put in "months of detailed, Emma-type work" to prepare for the role. "I don't think she was nervous. She just tends to step up to the plate."
Afterward, Emma felt more secure in her commitment to her craft. By then, of course, it had dawned on her that she was going to continue to be famous no matter what she did. ("It's past the point now," she acknowledges. "Harry Potter was so massive, I don't know if [my other projects] would even touch it, honestly, even make a dent.") Perhaps more importantly, she found out there were plenty of potential gigs that could live up to her own very high standards. "Hermione was a really difficult role to follow - I think she's one of the best literary female heroes in the history of fiction. But I thought that Sam" - her character in Perks - "was really special, too."
She seemed less close to Nicki, the fame-hungry would-be reality star she portrays in this summer's ripped-from-the-headlines crime caper The Bling Ring. Based on the true story of a group of image-obsessed teenage burglars who targeted the homes of Tinseltown's best dressed, the film, written and directed by Sofia Coppola, offered Emma the opportunity to play a completely different kind of character: a mildly villainous party girl who'd do almost anything for a taste of the kind of attention Emma's been dealing with for more than a decade. (It also gave her the chance to utter the sure-to-be-timeless line, "Come on, let's go to Paris's. I want to rob.")
"The way Nicki looks, what she wears, really does define her," Emma says. "I think a lot of her aspirations come from her mother, who was a Playboy centerfold and was supportive of her to the point where there were no boundaries. To her, the truth is totally bendable." But, she thoughtfully reflects, "the more research I did on my character, the more I empathized with her, which was surprising. I wasn't expecting that. I realized there's always a reason people are the way they are, and I think that made me more compassionate and less judgmental."
One thing that's very clear is that Emma did not take the part out of a desire to become, as she puts it, "the bad girl." In true Emma fashion, her decision was much more mindful than that. "I had to accept that the media would be really sensationalistic about my role," she explains, "but when people see the movie, they'll understand that's not what the part is about. And I know that Sofia wasn't interested in me for those reasons. I had to really earn the part." Over e-mail, the filmmaker confirms that Emma did indeed make an audition video in which she read a scene "wearing a ton of lip gloss. She's a smart, serious, polite young lady and had a sense of humour about her transformation, so it was fun."
It does sound like the straitlaced actress had a good time experiencing a different side of Los Angeles. "We spent a whole week at Paris Hilton's house," she says. "I have these incredible pictures on my phone of me with her pig, me with her six dogs... She also had hamsters, rabbits, and a monkey, although the monkey wasn't there when we were." The experience of being Nicki was so intense, in fact, that Emma sustained a cringe-worthy work-related injury without even noticing at first. "We were doing a scene in a nightclub," she recalls, "and this girl accidentally put her stiletto through my toe! And the crazy thing is, I had so much adrenaline going through my system that I just kept dancing until, finally, I looked down at my foot and saw the blood." Her costar Israel Broussard was, she says, "ready to carry me out."
Emma again plays against type in her other summer movie, the apocalypse comedy This Is the End. In that one, the stars - including James Franco, Seth Rogen, and Jonah Hill - play alternate-reality versions of themselves, as does Emma; it's not a spoiler to point out that her behavior in the film prompts Danny McBride to say another of this year's instantly iconic lines: "Hermione just stole all of our s***!"
Next year, she'll appear in director Darren Aronofsky's big-screen version of the biblical story of Noah's ark, but her most pressing project appears to be her education. She's only two semesters away from earning her B.A. in English literature. She's obviously enjoyed her time at school, even if she's not especially forthcoming with specifics (but as a movie star trying to blend in on campus, who can blame her?). During our interview, she says only one thing that can be even remotely construed as a reference to the boyfriend she reportedly met at Oxford and who has accompanied her to a number of events this year, including the MTV Movie Awards: "Every now and again, I feel a bit wobbly before hitting a red carpet," she confesses. "So it's always nice to bring friends, especially because I love to see their reactions. It's not normal to get out of a car and have, like, 80 people screaming at you, and so when they say, 'This is crazy,' it makes me feel slightly more sane."
Beyond graduation, Emma says, there's no major agenda, though not for a lack of wanting. "I wish so badly that I could have a plan," she says. "I'm someone who likes to be organized and know what she's doing, and this industry just does not permit that in any shape or form. You never know when a movie is going to start, if it's going to get financing, where it's going to be." The only definite thing, it seems, is that if she's going to do a particular film, it will be because she really wants to. "I'd rather..." She stops, then starts again. "How do I say this without sounding like an idiot? I'd rather not work than do something my heart isn't really into."
It's an admirable goal, made possible, of course, by her enviable position, but Emma does manage to be convincing when she says that, all things considered, she's probably not too far off from the person she'd be if she hadn't won that fateful Harry Potter part. "I'd like to think that I'd still be the same, that I'd still have the same kind of outlook. I'd still be about to graduate from college, and I think I would have tried acting one way or another. The fame is different," she admits, "and the scale is different. But I don't know how different." Prompted to hazard a guess about her potential alternate-universe day job, Emma laughs. "I'd probably have been a really great waitress."
Elegant Emma
Fashion has long been one of Emma's favorite extracurriculars: She's been a face of Burberry and a co-designer at the eco-friendly brand People Tree, and she even launched a capsule collection with Alberta Ferretti. But a little while ago, she says, "I took a very conscious step back. I think people were getting confused - they seemed to think that I was a fashionista or that fashion was my main thing, and I didn't want that once I figured out I really did want to act."
So, for the record, she's no longer a part-time designer. But she's still a very well-dressed - and knowledgeable - fan. "For basics," she says, "I shop at Aritzia and Topshop, and I also love A.P.C. and 3.1 Phillip Lim." But it's her big-night style that's truly stunning: "Chanel is amazing, and I wore a really beautiful black Dior dress recently that I thought was really cool. And I love Christopher Kane, Peter Pilotto," and, naturally, the designer of her Met Gala dress, Prabal Gurung. "They change a lot," she says of her favorites. "I'm always keeping an eye out for people who are new or up-and-coming."
If you have news to share (pictures, infos, scans...), please send an email to eden@emmawatson-updates.com
Follow the blog:
No comments:
Post a Comment