How Emma Watson learned to fit in

last updated 8 January 2015

Emma Watson had a hard time learning to be normal, said Evgenia Peretz in Vanity Fair. The 20-year-old Harry Potter star, who was Hollywood’s highest-paid actress in 2009, began college that same year at Brown University. “It was just awful,” she says of her first few weeks. The competitive Ivy League atmosphere, along with its hail-fellow-well-met enthusiasm and raucous partying, was alien to her English reserve. “I felt like I’d walked into an American teen movie,” she says. “I was like, I must be mad. Why am I doing this?”

Like her Potter character, Hermione Granger, Watson says, she had always been “super eager to please.” So it was important for her to fit in. “I was scared people would think, ‘You’re famous. Why should you deserve to be normal?’” Quickly enough, she discovered that she’d get no special treatment. Her roommate told her she found the Potter movies boring and knew little about her. In acting class, professors and fellow students were hardly in awe of her, and to her relief, Watson found that her years of professional acting experience were irrelevant. “I think actually I’m the worst in the class.”