Emma Watson, who reached the height of fame as an adolescent starring in the Harry Potter films, has stepped away from acting in recent years. Her reason? She just “wasn’t very happy” with the industry, as Watson told the Financial Times in a recent interview about her new gin brand. 

“I think I felt a bit caged,” the 33-year-old actor said. “The thing I found really hard was that I had to go out and sell something that I really didn’t have very much control over. To stand in front of a film and have every journalist be able to say, ‘How does this align with your viewpoint?’ It was very difficult to have to be the face and the spokesperson for things where I didn’t get to be involved in the process.”

Watson, who last starred as Meg March in 2019’s Little Women, said she felt confined by the need to front projects on which she didn’t have sizable creative input. “I was held accountable in a way that I began to find really frustrating, because I didn’t have a voice, I didn’t have a say,” she continued. “And I started to realize that I only wanted to stand in front of things where if someone was going to give me flak about it, I could say, in a way that didn’t make me hate myself, ‘Yes, I screwed up. It was my decision. I should have done better.’”

And while Watson has starred in major films including Disney’s live-action Beauty and the Beast and the coming-of-age classic Perks of Being a Wallflower, she’s also turned down her fair share of projects, including the live-action Cinderella and La La Land. “There have been hard moments in my career when I’ve had an agent or a movie producer say, ‘You are making a big mistake,’” Watson told Vanity Fair in 2017. “But what’s the point of achieving great success if you feel like you’re losing your freakin’ mind? I’ve had to say, ‘Guys, I need to go back to school,’ or ‘I just need to go home and hang out with my cats.’ People have looked at me and been like, ‘Is she insane?’ But, actually, it’s the opposite of insane.”

Instead, Watson has pivoted to her previously “unattainable” dream of directing, helming a Prada campaign she also wrote last year. As for a return to acting? “Yes, absolutely,” she told the outlet. “But I’m happy to sit and wait for the next right thing. I love what I do. It’s finding a way to do it where I don’t have to fracture myself into different faces and people. And I just don’t want to switch into robot mode anymore. Does that make sense?”