Emma Watson (16 page)

Emma also enrolled in a course in Shakespeare at the Royal Academy of Dramatic Arts (RADA) in London. It can’t have been easy for such a well-known actress to sign up for such a course, but it gave her the chance to brush off the slight feeling of inferiority about her acting skills that existed since her career began. ‘I’ve kind of come from nowhere and gone straight in at the top,’ she said when trying to explain the feeling of paranoia she had about her abilities. ‘Where do I go from here? I feel like I need to backtrack and work my way through again. I’d be really interested to kind of train properly because I feel I shouldn’t be here. I should have done so much more.’

While on the RADA course Emma was shown around the famed acting school by fellow student Roberto Agnillera from Italy. The pair became friendly and Emma invited him to a Cartier polo event at Windsor. The event was a good indication of the kind of high-end circles Emma was now moving in: Prince Charles, shoe designer Jimmy Choo, supermodel Agyness Deyn and DJ and producer Mark Ronson were all in attendance, along with a smattering of Rothschilds and Bransons. Emma was snapped with her arms around Roberto; a few days later, they were ‘papped’ again, leaving a bar in north London
with Roberto lurking a few paces behind Emma carrying her shopping bags. As far as the newspapers were concerned, she had a new man in her life – or, as the headline writers would continually have it, she was ‘casting her spell’. ‘Every boy I’m pictured with is my “boyfriend”,’ she sighed in an interview with the
Sunday Times
. ‘I’m never going to confirm or deny who I’m dating, but if they keep doing it the tally will get so high that I’ll look slutty – not very Hermione.’

One thing the RADA sessions definitely did was open her eyes to where her future education might lie: thanks not to the course, but to her fellow students. ‘
Three-quarters
of the students were from abroad, mainly the United States,’ she told
Interview
magazine. ‘I started talking to them about what they were doing at their schools, and I respected the approach. Here, I feel the specification is very narrow, whereas in America you’re encouraged to be broad and choose many different subjects. For someone who has missed as much school as I have, I want to go back and discover what else there is. I always loved school – I was a proper, proper nerd. I just want that back again.’

The only way to find out more was to go and see for herself – to discover whether her feeling that an American college would be the best way forward was the right one. ‘I’m really attracted by the liberal arts degree at US universities,’ she said. ‘They encourage you to study lots of different things so you do four different courses a term – so you can do 37 different courses in total – and choose your major in your third or fourth year. I can study so many
different things which I find so appealing, whereas if I stay in England then I’d just have to choose one subject and study it for three years. I find that quite narrowing, so I’m really attracted by the courses that they offer in the US.’

Emma went to see as many of the Ivy League American universities as she could – and created a stir wherever she went. W
ATSON VISIT CAUSES UPROAR
was the headline in the
Yale Daily News
when Emma went on a tour of the campus at the prestigious Connecticut university. Student John Song said that the ‘Yalies’ proved they weren’t too cool for school when they spotted the actress in the canteen. ‘Everyone just got out their phones and started calling people,’ he said. ‘There was kind of a little buzz around. Everyone was, like, “Oh my God, it’s Emma Watson,” but no one went up to her.’

Emma had lunch with some of the students and quizzed them about the campus, the courses and the facilities. It was student tour guide Drew Rowny’s job to show Emma around. ‘Emma Watson requesting a tour is a little bit different than Joe Six-Pack requesting a tour, but not so much,’ he said. ‘I think we treat everyone who asks for a tour pretty similarly. My sense is that she had a good visit, and that, who knows, hopefully, she’s going to put an application in.’

She also visited Harvard in Massachusetts, where she looked at the accommodation, the admissions office and the impressive Annenberg Hall, said to bear a striking resemblance to the Great Hall of Hogwarts. ‘I actually called my mom I was so distraught,’ student Brian Hill told the
Harvard Crimson
after bumping into the actress
as she did her tour. ‘It was all I could think about for the entire morning.’

The visits seem to have generated more heat than light, as her pleas for campus tours to be kept low-key seemed to have fallen on deaf ears at some of the universities. ‘I’m half wondering if that was a mistake,’ she said, reflecting on her decision to do the tours. ‘Because it just seems to have created more interest and more speculation, and now there are all these “authoritative sources” with different answers on what university I’m “definitely” going to.’

Tellingly, there was much less fuss about her visit to Brown University at Providence, Rhode Island. The independent coeducational college – its motto is ‘In God We Hope’ – prides itself on its campus made up of students from 50 countries, and part of the site dates back to its foundation in the 18th century. Officials at the university clearly took Emma’s pleas for privacy to heart and her visit was well below the radar. Perhaps this was somewhere that she could study in peace.

Emma decided that it was the right place, but was clearly keen to protect the decision she’d made. Press reports confidently claimed she was going to Columbia University and had already registered under her middle name of Charlotte. Another rumour that she had accepted a place at Yale was quickly jumped on via her website. ‘There have been several rumours spreading recently that Emma has accepted a place at Yale university after “telling fans via her Twitter account”. We would like to inform you that Emma does not have a Twitter account [she would get one later] and that these rumours are false. Emma is still trying
to decide whether she wants to attend university in the UK or the USA and hasn’t accepted any placements.’

Despite the excitement her visits caused, Emma seemed to be coming round to the idea of leaving Britain for a university in the US. ‘I never thought that I would want to go to America for university,’ she told journalist Derek Blasberg. ‘As a child, I aspired to go to Oxbridge, because that’s where my parents went. When my dad talks about his time there, he says it was the most incredible experience.’

When she wasn’t travelling the world, visiting universities, partying with the polo set or doing fashion shoots for
Vogue
, there was still the small matter of Emma’s day job – as an actress. Her sole film credit for 2008 was a new venture for her, lending her crisp tones to an animated feature film,
The Tale of Despereaux
.

The film – the story of a jug-eared mouse and his quest to rescue a princess in distress, whose full title is
The Tale of Despereaux: Being the Story of a Mouse, a Princess, Some Soup and a Spool of Thread
– was based on an
award-winning
2004 book by American author Kate DiCamillo.

The film had a fairly tortuous route to cinema screens. It was originally to be directed by Oscar-nominated French animator Sylvain Chomet before Mike Johnson was linked to the project. He was co-director of
Corpse Bride
with Tim Burton. Then Sam Fell (director of
Flushed Away
) and Rob Stevenhagen (an animator who’d worked on several movies, including
Who Framed Roger Rabbit?
and
Wallace and Gromit: The Curse of the Were-Rabbit
) came on board as co-directors.

Meanwhile, Emma was cast as Princess Pea. ‘She’s basically your quite generic princess,’ she told Movies Online. ‘She’s very beautiful and she lives in the Land of Dor and everything’s great. But then she loses her mother, and what makes it worse is that she not only loses her mother, she also loses her father because he goes into this state of grieving, and he just kind of locks himself away from his people and his responsibilities and also from his role as a father. So she’s pretty lonely, she’s pretty isolated, she’s kind of literally locked up in this tower, and she can’t really be part of the real world. So I thought it was interesting and felt very sad for her. I thought the conversations she had with Despereaux were really charming, and I really fell in love with the script and the book, more than the character.’

Emma was able to draw on her childhood love of Disney cartoons for her role as Princess Pea: remember that little girl who used to go to the shops dressed as a Disney princess? ‘I loved
The Little Mermaid
,’ she told
USA Today
when the film was released. ‘I really loved
Pocahontas
– she’s a free spirit, wild and bohemian. I’m a massive animated-film fan. And now I have my own.’

Co-director Sam Fell said he saw parallels between Emma and her character. ‘She has this amazing celebrity around her and, like the princess, she’s surrounded by it,’ he told journalist Kevin Williamson. ‘Yet, when we were working with her, we were saying, “Just be a normal girl, just be yourself.” And that’s sort of Pea’s position in a weird way, where she’s a celebrity but she just wants to have fun and chat with this mouse.’

Producer and screenwriter Gary Ross talked a good fight in describing the film in a documentary short that accompanied its DVD release: ‘This is a brand-new classic fairytale, which may seem like a contradiction, but it really is. Kate [DiCamillo] chose to tell a brand-new fairytale but with a nod to what makes fairytales kinda classic. We’re so lucky that we have a really wonderful cast. Dustin Hoffman, Emma Watson, Stanley Tucci, Kevin Kline, Sigourney Weaver, William H. Macy, Tracy Ullman and Matthew Broderick.’

Not that Emma had a great deal to do with the starry cast: with the exception of a few days in a studio in London with Broderick (as the mouse hero Despereaux), she worked alone. The pair worked on a key scene where Princess Pea and Despereaux meet for the first time. Her enjoyment of working with the American actor might have been heightened if she had known about his cartoon pedigree: he played Simba in one of her favourite childhood Disney cartoons,
The Lion King
. It wasn’t until the film was released that Emma realised Broderick had been such a part of her younger years. ‘No way! I didn’t realise that!’ she said when a reporter from MTV pointed out Broderick’s animated past. ‘I knew he was amazing anyway, but I didn’t realise he did
The Lion King
. That is awesome. I have a whole newfound respect. I’m now even more in love with him.’

She didn’t quite manage the same kind of bond with her other co-stars: the first time she met Weaver and Hoffman was at the premiere. The whole experience promised to be a new one. ‘Honestly, I didn’t really know what to expect,’
she said. ‘I read the script. They showed me some sketches of how Pea was going to look. I saw a couple of clips. Aside from that, I didn’t know where they were taking it.’

But Emma threw herself into the role with her usual level of commitment: ‘Working on Harry Potter and now
The Tale of Despereaux
… they are such loved books and popular characters you feel very responsible, you feel quite pressured to depict the character as they [readers] envisage it.’

On a performance level, she was used to acting with things that weren’t there – years of performing ‘alongside’ CGI Potter creatures helped her with that. But this time round
everything
was imaginary. The best that producers could do was give her a toy Despereaux that she held while the recording sessions took place, for her to act and react to. ‘To be honest, you feel like an idiot a lot of the time, particularly for my part, because it was quite physical,’ she told the
Chicago Tribune
. ‘I was being kidnapped, and I was being dragged around, and there was a rat in my room. There were moments you had to be out of breath. You have to kind of recreate this in a dark room, and you have to be quite imaginative about it all. So, when I’m screaming and being kidnapped, I was jogging on the spot for a couple of minutes beforehand trying to get me out of breath and get me in the moment.’

Emma recorded her sections over a long stretch of time, returning to make small changes and re-record passages of dialogue as and when the animators needed them. Her main concern was that she might sound too much like a certain Hogwarts schoolgirl. ‘I guess I have paranoid
moments where I will hear something in my own voice or I’ll go, “Gosh, do I sound like Hermione then?” You know, I definitely have an awareness of it because I’ve played her for so long and she is so distinctive and she is so much a part of me. So, yes, I definitely have an awareness of it, but Pea was more gentle. I instantly felt a different person or character playing her. I definitely had a sense of that. I was worried about it but it worked out OK – I think.’

The Tale of Despereaux
is a film that’s easier to admire than like. With its painterly visuals, sweeping tracking shots and worthy but dry messages, it’s the kind of animation that adults would like their children to enjoy, rather than a film that kids would clamour to see. There’s not a single laugh to be had in the converging stories of a brave little mouse in a kingdom that lives for soup who ‘loved honour and justice and always told the truth’ and the characters his bravery affects: a grieving king, his
doe-eyed
daughter (Watson), a rat, a chef and a simple-minded maid. There are no songs, no hip pop-culture references and no gags aimed over the heads of children to keep the adults on their toes. It’s like a meal that you eat because it’s good for you rather than one you enjoy.

Emma’s character of Princess Pea is said to be beautiful, like an angel. Her mother dies of shock when a rat falls into her soup on – of all days – Soup Day. There’s no attempt at an accent or a different tone – what we hear is the clipped, upper-crust Watson voice we are accustomed to.

The princess becomes invisible to her father, who banishes soup and rats and the kingdom becomes a place
of misery as the king is lost in his grief. Princess Pea finds herself in peril as she is held captive by the banished rodents in Ratworld. ‘I felt really sorry for her,’ Emma told
USA Today
. ‘She says that, “One day, my prince will come,” and it was really sweet that her prince came in the form of this goofy mouse with these enormous ears. I was genuinely interested to see how they [animated] it. I was always asking questions.’