New interview of Emma Watson for the Evening Standard

For all the fun she's had on the Hogwarts set, her estimated £24 million fortune, her youth, beauty and modelling contracts, it's hard to envy Emma Watson right now.

In the middle of a frenzy of publicists, stylists, journalists and stray fans at Claridge's hotel, the actress better known as Harry Potter's friend Hermione Grainger is jet-lagged and exhausted, vulnerable, pulled in all directions.

"The scale of the junket for this kind of movie is like, whoah," she says as she catches her breath after being gang-interviewed by foreign press.

Thank God, she doesn't quite say, I won't have to do this ever again.

The release of Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows: Part 2 marks the end of the line for the most successful franchise in movie history. This is the one where Harry has it out with Voldemort and Hermione finally kisses Ron. However, there has also been a secret narrative running through the Harry Potter movies that is just becoming interesting. As her once-cute co-stars Daniel Radcliffe and Rupert Grint endured the ungainly mutations of puberty, the once-gawky Watson has become lovelier with each film. You could admit that legally from The Order of the Phoenix onwards.

Now, while Grint advertises milk on the sides of London buses, Watson has been chosen to represent Burberry and Lancôme and graces the cover of American Vogue. Today, she wears a sequined Valentino dress, which she has the habit of scrunching up, then primly smoothing down, when nervous. Her dangling diamond earrings emphasise the pixie haircut she had once the "Hermione hairdressing" clause expired last year. She has a face that would inspire great acts of gallantry.

Poised, clipped, a little melancholy, she describes herself as "pretty emotional" to have reached the end. "It's been 12 years of my life. I think change for anyone is scary. But at the same time, it's exciting for me to watch the last film and think, 'Wow, I've really learned something'."

And what has she learned, at the eye of the £9.3 billion Potter industry? Kissing scenes are awkward, for one. "Having to kiss someone who feels like your brother, it's not ever going to be fun, is it?" she says, a line I suspect she has used before. "We were giggling like schoolchildren. But we were really happy with how it came out. It felt very Hermione and Ron."

Most of all, though, you have to "fight for your life", as former child actor Jodie Foster once put it. "You definitely have to find your voice. You have to say when enough is enough. My mum's always said that I've got grit and that's really helped."

Watson's parents, Jacqueline and Chris, both lawyers, divorced when she was five - she grew up in Oxford with her mother, stepfather, younger brother Alex (now a model) and two stepbrothers.

As the oldest sibling in a complicated family where children were treated as small adults, she learned to be headstrong early.

The film crew too became a surrogate family, from paternalistic producer David Heyman to the women in the make-up department where she fooled around between takes. She counts herself lucky to have made the films in a warehouse in Watford, not amid the madness of Hollywood, and to have had Grint and Radcliffe to share the experience. "Very often there'll be a child doing a movie on their own and they don't have any support."

Everyone involved in the film stresses the measures taken to normalise the situation, ease the pressure, keep them "in the bubble", as she puts it. Still, when I ask whether she would let her own child enter the bubble, the sure tone falters. "Oh, don't ask me that question!" She lowers her eyes, before deciding "no", in a small voice. "I probably wouldn't. If she really, really wanted to do it, then I would just make sure I was with her. I would make sure that she had the supportive family around her that I did."

She seems level-headed enough to deal with the wealth - her biggest extravagance is plane tickets, she says (she recently flew to Masai Mara in Kenya and was relieved that the Masai warriors did not recognise her). Being constantly pestered by kids with camera phones is annoying but liveable, she maintains. But there is something existentially weird about seeing her own image everywhere, on billboards, pencil cases, Lego sets. "I have to bear in mind that it's not me, it's my character. It looks like me; but it's not me. It's Hermione." She repeats it softly, like a spell. "It's Hermione, Hermione, Hermione."

At least she has the opportunity to lie low as Emma Watson in the near future. Having studied for two years at Brown, the Rhode Island Ivy League university, she is starting at Oxford in October.

(Rumours of bullying are far wide of the mark, she stresses; US students often spend their third years abroad). She is playing hard to get with casting directors and there will be no acting after she completes the US indie film, The Perks of Being a Wallflower, her first post-Potter role.

"I will be focusing solely on my studies. People were very respectful at Brown of my privacy - and I just hope that will be the same at home." She hopes to live in college and may even do student drama, "if it feels right".

Of the leading trio, it was only Watson who insisted on going to university - and an earnest yearning for adult insights communicates itself clearly now. She was recently blown away by Patti Smith's autobiography; the grim romantic film Blue Valentine left her feeling "physically ill for like three hours afterwards"; when I ask what acting roles she aspires to in future, she says: "I want to work with directors whom I feel I can keep learning from."

But she becomes most engaged when the conversation turns to painting, which she appears pretty good at. "My biggest difficulty is shutting my head up, there's just constant chatter. And [painting] is the one thing that I do where I can just stop thinking and get completely lost in, like, placing that piece of magazine in one of my collages. More and more I'm finding that when everything feels so enormous, when you feel really out of control, having something that you can control, that's small, is really satisfying. It's the little things that keep you sane."

An interviewer from Vogue reported seeing a self-portrait on the wall of her home: it showed her holding a camera, pointing it out to the viewer like a gun. She has decided not to share the sanity collages, however. "The really great actresses are the ones who retain a certain amount of mystique: Meryl Streep - you've got very little idea of what's going on in her life." To the point, when I ask if she is still single, she wriggles, laughs and declines to comment.

As for her status as a style icon, she has no further ambitions to design fashion (she helped create a collection for ethical label People Tree last year) but may continue to model. The Burberry shoot was liberating because "it let people see me as something other than Hermione".

She sees modelling as an extension of acting, in fact - just playing a role - but is conflicted about its demands. "I think the pressure the media and the fashion industry put on women to look a certain way is pretty intense. There's a certain tyranny to trying to achieve that kind of beauty. I don't know, I'm maybe not the best person to speak about this because I obviously completely adhere to it," she laughs nervously. "It's always scary to answer these questions when I'm still trying to figure out how I think about things. So please don't… I don't know…" and the sure turn falters and you remember she's still only 21.

She tells me she has not fully put childish things away either, keeping her wand, time-turner and cloak from the Harry Potter set, though she wishes she could have retained the invisibility cloak.

"That would be super-useful at times."

However, the most valuable souvenir will be her bond with Grint and Radcliffe, who have faced this strange journey with her.

"When all of this dies down, maybe in a year or two, that's probably when we'll need each other the most. We'll be like, 'Am I sane? Did I really remember this right? Did this really happen? Did we really feel this way?' The world will remember it in a different way from how we remembered it. I think we'll need each other to make it all make sense."

Source: ThisisLondon