It may seem like Emma Watson has been living every young actress' dream; driving crowds to the big screen since before she could even drive a car herself as Hermione Granger in the beloved "Harry Potter" films, but in a new interview, the 23-year-old is opening up about why she almost quit the Hollywood life for good.
"For a while I kind of bought into the hype of, 'Will they ever be able to play anything else?'" she told Entertainment Weekly of her mindset after the magical franchise ended in 2011. "It gave me a sense of paralysis and stage fright for a while. And then a professor told me that they didn't think I should act, either. So I was really grappling with it and wasn't feeling good about it. And then, I don't know ... it got so bad and people had put me in a box so much that it started pissing me off. I suddenly wanted to prove them wrong. It gave me fuel, in a way. I'm not sure why that shift happened."
While Watson did take a short break from acting, she admitted it was the script for the 2012 film "The Perks of Being a Wallflower" that drew her back in.
"I was really unsure, but then I read the script for 'The Perks of Being a Wallflower,' and falling in love with that and then having such a great experience on that movie kind of sealed the deal for me," she said. "I stopped intellectualizing it, and it became much more instinctual. I just got the bug and got very driven all of a sudden, which I really wasn't before. But I'm so happy. It's all felt very new to me, really."
Since "Wallflower," Watson has continued to prove that she is worlds away from her wizarding days with parts in the crazy comedy "This is the End" and Sofia Coppola's "The Bling Ring," an indie flick focused on the infamous Hollywood Hills burglaries.
As far as what's next for the young starlet, Watson said in June that she plans to return to Brown to continue her education after taking a brief break from the institution in 2011.
"I really like the fact that it has a very open curriculum, that there aren't any requirements," she said. "Really, I've kind of been in charge of my own education since I started out on Potter when I was 9 or 10, and I liked that I could design my own major if I wanted to."
