Emma Watson has admitted that she was told by a university teacher to drop out of Hollywood and opt for an alternate career. The popular actress has confessed that media questions over whether or not she could sustain a career after the success of the Harry Potter franchise began to affect her.
She admitted:
“For a while I kind of bought into the hype of, ‘Will they ever be able to play anything else?’.”
Emma Watson in Perks Of Being A Wallflower (Screengrab)
Speaking to Entertainment Weekly, she added: “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.”
The movie that changed her mind was The Perks Of Being A Wallflower, which quickly built up a huge following.
“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 intellectualising 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.”
