'Harry Potter' star Emma Watson felt 'caged,' leading her to step away from acting

foxnews.com:

Emma Watson is opening up about why she took a break from acting. In a recent interview with Financial Times, Watson went into detail about why she "wasn’t very happy" working as an actress and felt the best thing for her was to take a step back from acting and recharge.

Watson's last acting credit is 2019's "Little Women." "I think I felt a bit caged," Watson said. "The thing I found really hard was that I had to go out and sell something that I really didn’t have very much control over.To stand in front of a film and have every journalist be able to say, ‘How does this align with your viewpoint?’ It was very difficult to have to be the face and the spokesperson for things where I didn’t get to be involved in the process." As the star of a movie, Watson felt every critique was directed towards her, or she was held responsible for things she had no control over, something she "began to find really frustrating." Watson rose to fame in 2001 at the age of 11 when she starred as Hermione Granger in "Harry Potter and the Sorcerer's Stone." She continued to play the role until 2011 when the eighth and final film in the franchise was released when she was 21.

Since then, she starred in movies like "The Bling Ring," "The Perks of Being a Wallflower," "Beauty and the Beast" and "Little Women."  "I started to realize that I only wanted to stand in front of things where if someone was going to give me flak about it, I could say, in a way that didn’t make me hate myself, ‘Yes, I screwed up, it was my decision, I should have done better,’" Watson explained.

While "Little Women" was released in 2019, filming took place throughout 2018, and although Watson hasn't acted in five years, she said she "absolutely" would love to return to.