In April, Emma Watson turned 35 years old. She also celebrated more than five years away from the movies: the last time we saw her on the big screen was in Greta Gerwig‘s adaptation of Little Women, released back in 2019.
Though Watson has been largely away from the spotlight since then, she has kept busy. Watson started an MA in creative writing at Oxford University in 2023; according to the Daily Mail, university life captivates her so much that she also started a PhD program this year.
Perhaps Watson is making up for lost time. When she finished secondary school, she was unable to immediately enter university because she was committed to filming the last two installments of the Harry Potter saga. She took a gap year, then enrolled at Brown University to study English literature. Watson graduated in five years instead of four because she had to take two whole semesters off to film projects like My Week with Marilyn, The Perks of Being a Wallflower, The Bling Ring, This Is the End, and Noah.
This time around, she has taken a complete hiatus from her film career so that it does not interfere with her education. But this is not the only reason she has stepped away from the movies. “I think I felt a bit caged,” Watson told the Financial Times in the spring of 2023, shortly before starting her master’s degree. “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. 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.”
A few months later, in December 2023, she admitted to the British edition of Vogue that she was grateful for the respite she had taken. “I’m just so glad that I did [step away from acting] because I have this feeling of having my own voice and creative space and sovereignty in some way that I don’t think I did before – more autonomy,” she said. “I’m so glad that I allowed things to be messy for a minute and to really allow myself to not know [what’s next], because the knowing that I’ve come to, I wouldn’t trade that for anything.”
Watson used that creative space, to make her directorial debut in 2022 with a short film for Prada Beauty’s Paradoxe fragrance campaign; she also wrote the script and acted in it. In 2024, Watson became the face of Prada’s Re-Nylon collection, made solely from nylon taken from the recycling and purification of plastic collected from the sea.
Emma Watson has been committed to sustainable fashion since she was a teenager. In 2009 she was already linked as a creative advisor to People Tree, one of the pioneers of ethical fashion. In 2020 she joined the board of directors of People Tree. That same year, she also joined the board of directors of Kering, the luxury conglomerate that encompasses firms such as Gucci and Yves Saint Laurent, to lead its sustainability committee. Watson was its youngest member at the time.
She left the position in 2023, when she returned to university. That year Watson also began a new and novel business venture alongside her younger brother, Alex, with whom she is very close. (He also has a background in fashion; in 2010, he starred in a campaign for Burberry with his sister.) Watson launched her own French-style gin, Renais, recalling her roots: Watson was born and lived near Paris until her parents divorced when she was five years old.
