Interview

DEREK BLASBERG: I can’t believe that was your very first football match ever. What have you been doing your whole life?

EMMA WATSON: Oh, I don’t know. I did these littlefilms that no one’s ever heard of. Just a fewindependents.

BLASBERG: And I hear you just hosted your first-ever dinner party last night. How did that go?

WATSON: Well, it was a disaster. Not because I’m a terrible cook, but because the time limit was too short. I was only able to make half the pie—a cottage pie, which is this very British beef mince meal—so I had to abandon it.

BLASBERG: Was this one of those situations where you wish you had a magic wand?

WATSON: Oh, my god. That is the first time in the whole course of my knowing you that you’ve resorted to making a bad Harry Potter joke. This is a sad moment. But, yes, I ran out of time. It was like MasterChef in my kitchen last night, a really stressful atmosphere . . .

BLASBERG: With sweat dripping down your nose, and you panting heavily?

WATSON: Exactly. But as a debutante foray into entertaining, I aced it.

BLASBERG: What a weekend of firsts: first dinner party, first football game. What else?

WATSON: First time I worked with [photographer] Nick Knight. He was very nice, very English.

BLASBERG: Do you prefer working with an English team? When I visited you on the Harry Potter set, the majority of people were Englishmen.

WATSON: Well, I shouldn’t say I have a favorite director—that wouldn’t be very diplomatic. But one of the people I enjoyed working with most was Alfonso Cuarón [who directed Watson in the third Potter film, Harry Potter and the Prisonerof Azkaban (2004)]. I have a real thing forMexican directors. And I love Guillermo del Toro and Alejandro González Iñárritu.

BLASBERG: Is that why you were in Mexico earlier this year?

WATSON: I went because I wanted to travel and I had heard such great things about the country.I didn’t get to see any of those guys.

BLASBERG: Of course not. A young girl in Mexico means spring break! Cancún, baby! Tequila shots at Señor Frogs!

WATSON: That was the weirdest place ever. In Cancún, I felt like I had walked into an American teen movie. I was only there for two days—thankfully my friends and I were more interested in traveling around other parts of the country. But I seriously thought it was only like that in movies.

BLASBERG: When I was in high school, we went to Mexico for spring break, and it was surreal. Like, school nerds entering wet-T-shirt contests, and high-school jocks screwing the secretly slutty goth theater girls.

WATSON: It’s so exciting.

BLASBERG: This is what you missed while you were doing Harry Potter, Emma.

WATSON: I know. I feel so deprived. But Cancún was certainly not my favorite. We went to Ixtapa, where the ruins are. It was a beautiful, chilled-out part of the country. We went to Mexico City, which was amazing, but quite dangerous. We were happy to get out of there in the end. And we went to Cuba—I would tell everyone to go to Cuba now, because in 10 years it will be completely different.

BLASBERG: Do you like to travel?

WATSON: Yes, and that’s where the films have helped. With Harry Potter, I’ve been all over the world. I probably wouldn’t have gone to New York so young if it weren’t for the films. I was 11, and I remember it distinctly because it was just after 9/11. I was at ground zero, looking at this gallery that had messages and drawings all over the walls.

BLASBERG: That’s heavy stuff for an 11-year-old.

WATSON: Yeah, it was. I remember one of the producers gave this great speech while we were there, saying that maybe the reason Harry Potter was so successful, particularly then, was because people really wanted to be uplifted or taken to another place.