Most teenagers have a pretty similar experience—dating, high school, prom. But most teenagers didn’t grow up spending their time on one of the most successful movie sets of all time. Emma Watson started playing Hermione Granger in the Harry Potter series when she was just 9-years-old, thus eliminating the possibility of a normal high school experience. So the British actress jumped at the chance to portray a typical teenager in The Perks of Being a Wallflower.
“It felt pretty exotic to me,” she noted in an interview with Yahoo! News. “It really did. It was a very voyeuristic experience. Getting to go to Friday night football and Olive Garden, school dances and all of that stuff. That was really another world to me.”
Watson did spend pretty much her entire childhood filming the eight Harry Potter movies, resulting in a somewhat sheltered life. “There are some parts of me that feel very old, and then there are other parts of me that are, like, I have a sense of my own arrested development,” the 22-year-old said. “There are some parts of me right now that are probably going through adolescence.”
The actress was also eager to take on a role that might let her fans see her in a different light. “I hope what they can see is that I am able to transform, that there are other sides of me that perhaps they haven’t seen yet, and that they might allow me a little bit of room,” Watson said. “I mean, just doing American really is different. People have said to me that they keep forgetting it’s me when they see the movie, which for me is more than enough. That’s a success in itself for me, really.”
