in common with her most famous charac-
ter, Hermione Granger, the studious and
loyal mudblood wizard of the Harry Pot-
ter movies, who battled bigotry and
defied expectations. “With actors who get
to choose their roles, you look at their
résumés and you start to see a kind of
autobiography emerge,” Condon says. In
recent years Watson has launched the
online reading club Our Shared Shelf, and
she has been a leader in feminist causes
like the United Nations HeForShe
campaign, dedicated to enlisting men in
the fight for equality. “From what I’d seen
of Emma,” Condon says, “she seemed
to be the person, both on screen and
off, who best reflected the qualities that
Belle embodied.”
She has been this way from the start.“Her high intelligence was in evidence
early, when she was just a 10-year-old
girl,” says Alan Horn, chairman of Walt
Disney Studios, who was president of
Warner Bros. Entertainment when she
was cast in the Harry Potter films. “As she
grew—11, 12, 13, 14—it was clear she had
an extraordinary mind and that she was
going to do other big things. It doesn’t
surprise me at all that as she grew into
young womanhood this intelligence man-
ifested itself as activism.”
WhenEntertainment Weekly sat down
with Watson a few weeks ago, she was
just five days from demonstrating at the
Women’s March in Washington, D.C.,
alongside her mother. We spoke about
bringing her childhood Disney hero to
life, what struggles she sees today for
women and girls, and the movie that
made her decide not to quit acting.As you developed your version of
Belle, what did you want to retain
from the animated version?
What’s so beautiful about this story as a
whole is this idea that Belle is able to see
past these extraneous, external, super-
ficial qualities of Beast. She is able to
see deeper, and that’s one of her special
powers. It is her superpower: empathy.
In your film, Belle is more than a book-
worm. She puts her knowledge to
practice, inventing a washing machine
so she can give a laundry girl more
time to read. The villagers destroy it.( From left )Watson on
horseback; with
Gaston (Luke Evans)“Belle is able
to see deeper,
past Beast’s
external
qualities.
It is her
superpower:
empathy.”
—EMMA WATSONWATSON: DISNEY; WITH EVANS: LAURIE SPARHAM/DISNEY