Saturday, May 5, 2007

The Harry Potter kids are definitely taking a machete to the fields and cutting a unique path for their lives. They're not following the Disney road of starring as a Mouseketeer or in a wacky show or film, and then following it up with hit pop records and overwhelmingly saccharine and similar "girly" high school and romance features. Could this be a product of British family films? Or, perhaps, does the Potter franchise have some sort of educational magic for its stars? The current boy wonder Daniel Radcliffe has shown his nethers on the public stage and proved that he will not be slid into typecasting, and now we've got Emma Watson musing about her own path.

She recently sat for an interview with an Italian magazine, which The Leaky Cauldron has since translated. First things first -- she only briefly discusses the upcoming Harry Potter and the Order of the Phoenix, mostly to describe her role in the student uprising and Hermione's quest for knowledge. Then she gets into the meat that everyone has been musing about since the series came out -- what will ultimately happen to this group of kids whose entire adolescence will unfold in front of the camera? Watson says that she's received a number of offers to play go that Disney route, but as she says those American high school student roles are "to be honest, my worst nightmare." Could we maybe start shipping off stateside teen actresses to the Watson school of thought?

Although she's refusing that path, Watson also says, "I won't be appearing naked on stage with a horse." The Potter progeny really know how to defy expectation. The young man is stripping to be taken for a serious actor, and the woman is looking to travel and perhaps make a foreign name for herself. What's next?! Watson says that she likes "almost everything which is not English," and loves France. So, if she can pull herself out of the typecast rut, maybe she'll become the next Julie Delpy instead of Hilary Duff.

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