If you grew up with the Harry Potter books, it's easy to feel like you also grew up with the characters. No one understood you the way Harry, Ron, and Hermione did. And for the actors who actually played these iconic characters, that is doubly true. In fact, Emma Watson (who played the cleverest witch in her year) says that there's actually a downside to having grown up with a personality she spent almost a decade bringing to life.
"[I've] spent more than half of my life pretending to be someone else. While my contemporaries were dying their hair and figuring out who they were, I was figuring out who Hermione was and how best to portray her," she told Porter magazine about the process. But it's been four years since Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows: Part 2 premiered, and Emma says that "now at 25 for the first time in my life I feel like I have a sense of self that I’m comfortable with. I actually do have things that I want to say and I want to be my most authentic self."
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And what does that authentic self look like? It's a bundle of contradictions in the best way possible. "It sounds like a ridiculous thing to say, but I’m very interested in truth, in finding ways to be messy and unsure and flawed and incredible and great and my fullest self, all wrapped into one," she says. "When you watch the work of someone like actress Emma Thompson, you feel like you’re seeing something true, and I aspire to that."
And if you ask us, aiming to be messy and unsure and flawed and incredible and great and our fullest selves sounds like a pretty awesome New Year's resolution — and one that, yes, even Hermione would cosign.
Related: 10 Times Hermione Granger Was the Real Hero in Harry Potter
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