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Emma Watson has spoken out for the first time about being banned from driving in the UK for six months - explaining how it felt for her ‘shame’ to be highly publicised.
High Wycombe Magistrates' Court informed the Harry Potter actress in July that she had been caught driving 38mph in a strict 30mph zone in Oxford.
Watson, who already had nine points on her driving license, was informed that her license would be suspended for six months and that she would have to pay a total of £1,044 in fines.
The 35-year-old student did not attend the five-minute hearing, according to the BBC at the time.
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Watson has now broken her silence on the situation, claiming she’s swapped her car for a bicycle instead.
She made the confession on Jay Shetty’s On Purpose podcast, which was released on Wednesday (24 September).
“I recently started riding a bicycle,” she began. “Yes, I started riding a bicycle before my driving ban, but now it’s particularly fortuitous that I also ride a bicycle for that reason.”
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When asked how it felt for the driving ban to become ‘mainstream’ news, the Hermione Granger favourite admitted: “Oh my God, I was getting phone calls, like it’s on the BBC, it’s on international worldwide news.”
She added: “I was like, my shame is everywhere.”
Watson has turned her predicament into a positive, telling 38-year-old Shetty that she’s been able to connect with other people who have also lost their driver's licenses.
“I think, in a funny way, what the sweetest result of it was getting so many messages from people being like, ‘It happened to me too. I feel you. This is awful. It sucks',” she shared. “Which was kind of nice in a way. ‘Do you need a lift?’ I was like, actually, yes.”
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The Little Women star, who has been studying a Master’s Degree in Creative Writing at Oxford University since 2023, said that her speeding ticket was the result of her ‘awkward transition’ away from celebrity life.
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She said that she’d recently gone from only driving on the weekends or the holidays to ‘driving [herself] all the time’ because of her academic pursuits.
“And yeah, I did not have the experience or skills, clearly, which I now will and do.”
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Watson also revealed how ‘humbling’ it was to go from performing ‘complex tasks’ on film sets to being unable to complete ‘pretty basic life things’, such as keeping to a speed limit.
“I’m like, ‘Okay, Emma, you seem to be unable to remember keys, unable to keep yourself at 30 miles an hour in a 30-mile speed limit. You don’t seem able to do some pretty basic life things',” she joked.
“I had days where I just wanted to turn around to people and be like, ‘I used to be good at things, OK? I used to be really good at things! I know it doesn’t look like that right now, but I used to.”
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Following the conclusion of the eight Harry Potter films in July 2011, Watson has landed a handful of roles, including appearing as the notorious Nicki in The Bling Ring and Sam in The Perks of Being a Wallflower.
Broaching her post-HP career on the On Purpose podcast, Watson admitted it’d been ‘a very painful experience’.
She explained it was because she had the ‘expectation’ that she and her colleagues were ‘going to be lifelong friends’, just like her and Daniel Radcliffe, 36, and Rupert Grint, 37.
“I came to work looking for friendship, and that was a very painful experience for me outside of Harry Potter and in Hollywood, like bone-breakingly painful, because most people don’t come to those environments looking for friendships,” she said, holding back tears.
Watson added: “It’s so unusual to make a set of films for 12 years, and we were a community,
“We really were. And so I took that as an expectation into my other workplaces, and I just got my a** kicked. I really did.”
Topics: Emma Watson, Harry Potter, TV And Film, Entertainment, Celebrity, Podcasts
Ella Scott