After starring in major films for most of her life, Emma Watson made a conscious decision to take a break from acting after starring in Greta Gerwig's 2019 adaptation of Little Women. As she told Vogue in 2024, "I have this feeling of having my own voice and creative space and sovereignty in some way that I don’t think I did before—more autonomy...There is just absolutely no level of success that will make you in any way happy or content if you do not like who you are or enjoy what you’re doing when no one’s watching."

Here's what she's been up to since she stepped out of the spotlight:

She and fellow Harry Potter stars Daniel Radcliffe and Rupert Grint reunited for the film franchise's twentieth anniversary special on HBO, Return to Hogwarts, in 2021.
She made her directorial debut in 2022 with the Prada Paradoxe campaign.
After completing a degree in English literature at Brown in 2014, she returned to school for her PhD at Oxford in 2023. At Oxford, she wrote a one-woman play about herself. As she told Jay Shetty on his On Purpose podcast: "I wrote the play about me transitioning from basically being a full-time actress, an activist, to trying to move home and like be a normal student and attend a normal university as a super famous person."
As if this all weren't enough, she even launched her own gin brand, Renais, alongside her brother Alex, in 2024.

Currently, she seems busy enough with her studies at Oxford, but after graduation, who knows? Maybe she'll return to the big screen eventually.