Emma in Nylon and Elle

Emma Watson, Logan Lerman and Ezra Miller were featured in Nylon magazine, credit to septimiu29 for the scans.

Elle also has a feature on Emma in their Women in Hollywood issue. Thank you to SaRa for sending in a transcript.

EMMA WATSON
As Harry Potter’s wand-wielding, scene-stealing, know-it-all sidekick Hermione Granger, Emma Watson grew up before our eyes. Now she’s working her magic in a series of challenging, high-profile adult roles. Hogwarts? What Hogwarts?

In 2001, a reedy-voiced, frizzy-haired slip of a girl in a school cloak and tie slid open a train door on the Hogwarts Express and uttered her opening line: “Has anyone seen a toad?” Thus the world met Emma Watson, who, at nine years old, beat out squillions of other hopefuls for the role of magical Muggleborn witch Hermione Granger in Harry Potter and the Sorcerer’s Stone. “I just knew, from the moment I read it, that I was meant to play that role,” says Watson, now 22 and having undergone, over the course of the nine Potter films, a Polyjuice Potion–worthy transformation from that tiny, tenacious Hogwarts newbie into a gamine, self-possessed, exceptionally charismatic grown-up. “My first impression of her was that she was so young and successful and beautiful, but had so much to prove to herself. That gave her a lot of depth, and also a touch of loneliness,” says Stephen Chbosky, who directed Watson’s first major post-Potter role, in an adaptation of his 1999 best-selling novel, The Perks of Being a Wallflower, about a group of high school misfits. As Sam, a troubled but tenderhearted teen, she projects both a surprisingly mature emotional intelligence and a riveting, bursting-from-the-screen energy. “She is one hell of a leading lady,” Chbosky says.

While her Potter costars began to take on other projects before the final chapter of the franchise hit theaters, Watson chose to hit the books at Brown University instead. “I craved normalcy,” she says. “I wanted to have a college experience like other people my age.” Now (with one semester left), she’s suddenly in the curious position of being an on-the-rise starlet more than a decade after she became world famous, having landed plum roles in a series of auteur-helmed films. Next spring, she’ll appear as tramp-stamped L.A. luxury-goods thief Nicki in Sofia Coppola’s The Bling Ring, based on the stranger-than-fiction story of Alexis Neiers, the reality-TV star who burgled Lindsay Lohan’s house in 2009. Next, she’ll play “Emma Watson” in metacomedy The End of the World, cowritten and directed by Seth Rogen, in which a group of celebs—including Paul Rudd, Michael Cera, Mindy Kaling, and Rihanna—are attending a party at James Franco’s house when the Apocalypse arrives. “It was essentially a stand-up-comedy situation,” she says. “So for me, it was like landing on Mars. I was like, ‘I can’t do this, this is mad,’ but eventually I just kind of let go. I have no idea where I got half the stuff that came out of my mouth.”

That willingness to pull out the stops has directors spellbound: Both Chbosky and Coppola praise the freedom and fluidity with which Watson loses herself in a scene or a role. (“She transformed into the part,” Coppola says. “She could switch back and forth between a posh British accent and a slutty Valley Girl, just like that. Oh, and I was really impressed by her hip-hop dancing.”) She also has an intrinsic ability to home in on her characters’ humanity. “When I read the Bling Ring script,” Watson says, “I was like, This is about a superficial, materialistic, attention-seeking girl. But then I realized she was pursuing things she believed would make her feel loved. It made me sad.”

Watson, who has also established herself as something of a pixie-chic fashion It Girl with stints modeling for Burberry and Lancôme, is currently filming Darren Aronofsky’s biblical epic Noah alongside Russell Crowe, and developing her forthcoming role in Beauty and the Beast with Pan’s Labyrinth director Guillermo del Toro. (“He’s obsessed with the idea of creating worlds,” she says. “We’re even going to have this amazing language that we made up.”) But Watson isn’t one to forget where it all began. “I put one of the Potter films on the other night,” she says. “And it was amazing to me that I had done all of that. I have to remind myself every now and then.”—April Long

Q You’ve said that being famous makes you uncomfortable. How so?
A I’m dealing with people’s projections of me. I don’t know when people look at me if they see a beautiful dress I wore on the red carpet, or all of the magic and hype of Harry Potter. They very rarely just see who I am, which is a normal, human 22-year-old girl.

Q Have you had to fight for a part?
A Not exactly. But after auditioning for Sofia [Coppola], I didn’t hear from her for a while. I thought, Oh my God, I really want this part, so I wrote her an e-mail being like, “Look, I know I’m not the obvious choice, I couldn’t be more unlike the girl you’d probably cast in this, and I appreciate that I have a lot of work to do, but I feel really passionate about this. Please, would you just consider me?” And I got an e-mail back saying, “You already got it.”

Q Are there certain types of roles you particularly want to play?
A Eventually I’d love to do something where I get to sing, even though it would be terrifying.

Q Do you think you’re hitting your stride at a time when women’s roles are getting more diverse?
A Definitely. That’s one of the reasons why it was such an honor to work with Sofia—she writes such complicated, interesting female roles. I think there’s a shift, thanks to movies like Bridesmaids and people like Lena Dunham and Emma Stone. There’s a space for female characters that are more than two-dimensional, an understanding that we can be lots of different things at once. We can be funny, we can be a little fucked-up—it’s not just about being the martyr or the whore, the smart one or the dumb blond.

posted by dook on Monday, October 15th, 2012, filed under Beauty, Magazines.