While most humans spend their awkward adolescent years grappling with their own identity, child actors have the harder coming-of-age chore—fumbling around finding their own individuality while immersing themselves fully into a range of fictional characters. And because Emma Watson was thrust into this personality bifurcation for Harry Potter at the tender age of 10, the Ivy League–educated actress and U.N. Women Goodwill Ambassador reveals that, at 25, she is finally getting to know her true self.
“[I’ve] spent more than half of my life pretending to be someone else,” Watson tells Porter in a new interview. “While my contemporaries were dying their hair and figuring out who they were, I was figuring out who Hermione was and how best to portray her.
“Now at 25 for the first time in my life I feel like I have a sense of self that I’m comfortable with,” she explains. “I actually do have things that I want to say and I want to be my most authentic self.”
Watson explains that this self-assurance extends well beyond her career, even to fashion.
“When I was younger I remember being told ‘no pain no gain,’ but recently my willingness to wear something that makes me freezing cold or that I can’t walk in has changed.”
(Perhaps one stylish case in point of this new sartorial mindset: the Dior couture dress-over-pants she wore to the 2014 Golden Globes.)
Watson continues, “I want to feel fabulous and comfortable and sexy and strong and beautiful. And if it’s making you uncomfortable, don’t do it. It’s so sad if you need to go home just because you need to sit down! Moving forward, I’m prioritizing just feeling awesome.”
Part of feeling awesome, she reveals, is not projecting some false image of herself as other celebrities—or any person with a social-media account—might.
“I don’t want there to be a big separation between the public and the private person. It’s definitely the harder road to tread, but without a doubt, ultimately the most rewarding,” she tells the magazine. “It sounds like a ridiculous thing to say, but I’m very interested in truth, in finding ways to be messy and unsure and flawed and incredible and great and my fullest self, all wrapped into one.”
