Check out this feature film in which Emma Watson plays a truly opposite role to Hermione Granger in Harry Potter and, by her own admission, her personality.
Emma Watson absolutely wanted to play this role yet very far from her true personality and this because she wanted to shoot with the director Sofia Coppola. This is The Bling Ring.
A group of Los Angeles teenagers are fascinated by seemingly easygoing celebrities and their expensive lifestyles. By tracking stars via the internet, teenagers take advantage of their absence to rob them by stealing their branded items, from clothes to shoes to jewelry. This group is nicknamed the “Bling Ring”, which can be translated as “Glitzy Circle”.
A24
The Bling Ring is written and directed by Sofia Coppola and performed by actress Emma Watson, among others, who at the time was coming out of more than ten years devoted to the Harry Potter saga, of which she was one of the heroines. This role of superficial burglar was therefore not self-evident for the actress, who was open to QG :
I fought for the part, because I really wanted to play it. First, I was a big fan of Sofia. I’m probably the least obvious choice to play this role, because he’s the epitome of everything that people don’t consider me to be.
Her character, Nicki, is indeed very different from that of Hermione in Harry Potter and more generally from her personality:
A24
“We are opposites. When I read the script I realized it was basically a meditation on fame and what our society has become, I knew I had to do it. The character is everything I strongly oppose: she is superficial, materialistic, conceited, immoral. I really hated her.
But how do you play someone you hate? It was very interesting and it gave me a whole new vision of what my work and my role as an actress could be.”
Selected at the opening of the Un Certain Regard section at the 2013 Cannes Film Festival, The Bling Ring had not really met with success when it was released in theaters with only 20 million dollars reported worldwide at the end of its exploitation.
If you want to catch up, it is available on the UniversCiné platform.