Emma Watson: Noah and Harry Potter actress ‘excited about the aging process'. She's 23

Emma Watson attends the New York premiere of Noah (Getty Images)

Emma Watson carved a career for herself before she’d even hit secondary school, playing the feisty by cherub-faced Hermione Granger in the Harry Potter film series.

Several big, adult movies later, and she’s stepped away from her wholesome, childlike imagine, attempted to enjoy a slightly more private life at Brown university and hit the grand old age of 23, at which she is already “excited about the aging process”.

“As a younger woman, that pressure got me down but I’ve made my peace with it,” she told the Sunday Times.

Emma Watson and Jennifer Lawrence combined by the magic of Photoshop

“With airbrushing and digital manipulation, fashion can project an unobtainable image that’s dangerously unhealthy.

“I’m excited about the ageing process. I’m more interested in women who aren’t perfect. They’re more compelling.”

In a separate interview, she broached the rarely chartered subject of her love life, insisting that she prefers to date civilians, but hates the way her own fame catapults them into the public eye.

Speaking to Australian Elle magazine, the Noah actress, who is currently in a relationship with Oxford University student Matt Janney, said: “I don't date people who are famous, and I don't think it's fair that, all of a sudden, intimate details of their personal life are public as a direct result of me.

“I wish I could protect them.”

She went on to say that she’s worked as hard to shake her ‘good girl’ child actor image in her personal life as she has in her professional, even – shock of all shocks – breaking into a hotel swimming pool for an unsolicited dip in at 3am.

“It was at a hotel, it had a gate around it. My friends turned around and basically I was gone.

“The next thing they saw was me 7ft up in the air, scaling the fence. I shouldn't be able to get away with what I'm getting away with.”

Watson will next appear in Noah, which hit screens across the UK on Friday 4 April.