Rebel Belle

Before she agreed to star in Disney’s live-action Beauty and the Beast, Emma Watson wanted her princess to get a serious rethink. The new girl-power icon opens up about her career and commitment to female empowerment

- Anthony Breznican And Devan Coggan

There must be more than this provincial life … ” In the original 1991 Disney animated film Beauty and the Beast, the winsome, bookish Belle strolls through her village singing this lyric – a dreamer’s lament for escape and adventure.

But in the new live-action version (out now), Emma Watson delivers the line in a way that’s more urgent and heartbreaking than ever before. There’s darkness at the edge of this provincial life. Belle’s ideas and independence are considered worse than unladylike. They’re dangerous. Subversive. “They see her as a threat,” says director Bill Condon (Dreamgirls). “It’s that thing that remains under the surface.” While the animated Belle wasn’t exactly passive, this time she’s a more intrepid hero from the start, trying to rescue others as well as herself. She isn’t just the daughter of an inventor, but an engineer in her own right, who designs a washing machine that frees the village girls from their chores, allowing her time to teach them how to read.

Watson, now 26, won the role not because of her dancing, singing, or horse riding (all of which she says needed work) but because she has much in common with her most famous character, Hermione Granger, the studious and loyal mudblood wizard of the Harry Potter movies, who battled bigotry and defied expectations.