Emma Watson is speaking out about the challenges of working in Hollywood.
The 35-year-old actor — who last appeared onscreen in Greta Gerwig’s 2019 film, Little Women — opened up about the difficulty of making friends in the entertainment industry during Wednesday’s episode of Jay Shetty’s On Purpose podcast. She confessed that after working on the Harry Potter films during her childhood and becoming close to her castmates there, she expected that to happen on other films and TV sets.
“[I thought] that the people I worked with were going to be my family and that we were going to be lifelong friends,” she explained. “I came to work looking for friendship and that was a very painful experience for me outside of Harry Potter and in Hollywood.”
“Like bone-breakingly painful because most people don’t come to those environments looking for friendships,” she continued.
Watson acknowledged that many of her colleagues in the entertainment industry didn’t have the same perspective as her.
“They’re looking for: ‘This is my chance. This is my role. This is what I want out of it. I’m focused. This is my job. This is my career.’ And I was not of that mindset,” she added. “I found the rejection really painful.”
She emphasized how challenging it was for her to continue her career after playing Hermione Granger in the Harry Potter films, when she worked alongside Daniel Radcliffe and Rupert Grint, from 2001 to 2011.
“It’s so unusual to make a set of films for 12 years and we were a community. We really were,” she said about the franchise. “And so I took that as an expectation into my other workplaces, and I just got my ass kicked. I really did.”
When Shetty asked her if it was “competition, envy, or hierarchy” that made it difficult for her to make friends in the industry, Watson said it was all of the above.
“I’m just not thick-skinned, or maybe I wasn’t built for those highly competitive environments,” she said, as her voice emotionally began to break. “But in a way, I’m proud that it did because I guess that means I have something left to break. I have a heart left to break.”
Although this was a “hard learning” experience, Watson was proud of the fact that there were things she “couldn’t withstand” and that she got to keep her “humanity.”
The Perks of Being a Wallflower star also said that while she beat herself for years for not being “strong enough,” she later realized that if she had “come out on top,” it would have been a “greater failure” in terms of who she wanted to be.
“I’ve just got to this place where if it costs me any part of my peace, it’s just too expensive,” she concluded.
Although Watson isn’t retired from acting, she has now taken a step back from it, which she’s been open about. During an interview with Hollywood Authentic earlier this month, she said that while she reached success early in her career, there are things about acting that she doesn’t miss.
“In some ways, I really won the lottery [with acting], and what happened to me is so unusual,” she said. “But a bigger component than the actual job itself is the promotion and selling of that piece of work, this piece of art. The balance of that can get quite thrown off. I think I’ll be honest and straightforward, and say: I do not miss selling things. I found that to be quite soul-destroying.”