Beauty And The Beast Emma Watson

Emma Watson stars as Belle and Dan Stevens as the Beast in Disney's Beauty and the Beast, a live-action adaptation of the studio's animated classic directed by Bill Condon.

Today, the actor, whom most know from his role as Matthew Crowley on the hit series Downton Abbey, will make his debut as the Beast in Disney’s highly anticipated live-action flick “Beauty and the Beast.” Stevens is starring opposite Emma Watson, who plays Belle. He told ABC News there were several things he had to do to prepare for the role, including learning to dance with Watson while on stilts.

“She’s a great dancer but she was terrified of me that I was going to break her toes in these contraptions that I was wearing, ” Stevens said during an appearance on “Popcorn with Peter Travers.” “Fortunately we learned the dance on the ground. As I always say to my kids, if you think you can fly, always test it taking off from the ground. So we learned it on the ground and then worked our way up to these stilts.”

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But it’s not just stilts that help this live-action version of the Beast stand out in the film. Stevens revealed that this time the Beast will get his own musical number.

The Beast didn’t have a song in the animated film but in the stage show he did. That song didn’t work so they wrote a new one. And it’s fantastic, ” Stevens, 34, told Travers. Songster Josh Groban will lend his voice to the newly penned tune called “Evermore.”

While Disney fans are rejoicing at the release of a new princess film, Marvel Comics fans are already taking in FX’s “Legion, ” also starring Stevens. The series centers on a young man diagnosed with schizophrenia. It turns out that not only is his diagnosis wrong, he's also a mutant with incredible powers.

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Watch interviews with Ben Affleck, Denzel Washington and Natalie Portman in the latest episodes of ABC News' Popcorn With Peter Travers HERE.

He's a guy who's been told he's a paranoid schizophrenic his entire life and is certainly exhibiting a lot of these symptoms. There's lots of strange things happening to him, Stevens said. He's diagnosed as one thing, institutionalized pretty much his whole adult life, then a group of people come in and tell him something radically different.

Though the mutant world will be wild and fun like in the comics, viewers are almost invited inside his head, Stevens said about the audience experience.

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Be sure to watch the full interview above to see Stevens sharing more inside details about both of his exciting new characters.Emma Watson says she has made her Belle ‘the kind of woman I would want to embody as a role model’. Photograph: Laurie Sparham/PR Company Handout

She’s about to star as the heroine of Disney’s Beauty and the Beast, but post-Potter she has received more plaudits for her activism than her acting

I t may seem strange that one of the most anticipated films of 2017 should be a live-action remake of a Disney cartoon about Stockholm syndrome, but Beauty and the Beast has already built up the kind of fan base that is normally reserved for rebooted sci-fi franchises and adaptations of erotic bestsellers. When the first trailer went online in November, it was viewed a record 127m times in 24 hours, beating the previous leaders in that particular field, Star Wars: The Force Awakens and Fifty Shades Darker. Stranger still, 27m of those views were on the Facebook page of the film’s star, Emma Watson.

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That figure might suggest that the 26-year-old who played Hermione Granger in the Harry Potter series is now a bona fide superstar. But Watson’s celebrity status is slightly more complicated. As a Hollywood player, she isn’t going to give Jennifer Lawrence or Scarlett Johansson sleepless nights, but as an actor-activist she has the kind of influence that would have been unimaginable a generation ago.

For proof that Watson isn’t yet an A-lister, you just have to glance at her filmography since she hung up her Gryffindor robes. Broadly speaking, she has taken supporting roles in ensemble projects, such as Simon Curtis’s My Week with Marilyn and Darren Aronofsky’s Noah, and above-the-title roles in films that vanished without trace. Alejandro Amenábar’s repressed-memory chiller Regression didn’t recoup its $20m budget, and Colonia (AKA The Colony) pulled in a grand total of £47 in its opening weekend in the UK. Meanwhile, she turned down the title role in Kenneth Branagh’s Cinderella, and accepted then dropped out of La La Land, thus handing Emma Stone the part that may well win her a best actress Oscar. In the years between Harry Potter and Beauty and the Beast, in other words, Watson was better known for films she wasn’t in than for films she was.

‘She is clearly not an activist of the old school’ ... Emma Watson at the Noah film premiere in New York. Photograph: Startraks Photo/Rex Shutterstock

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In contrast, Kristen Stewart followed her stint in the Twilight series by embracing arthouse cinema and being embraced right back: she was the first American female actor to win a César award for her performance in Clouds of Sils Maria. And Harry Potter himself, Daniel Radcliffe, has grabbed every possible acting opportunity, from big-budget capers (Now You See Me 2) to indie curios (Swiss Army Man), from television (A Young Doctor’s Casebook) to theatre (Rosencrantz & Guildenstern are Dead). Compared to them, Watson is barely trying.

But there is more on her mind than acting. Having stepped away from the business to study for an English degree at Brown University in Rhode Island, she now spends as much time on feminism as she does on films. In 2014, she became a UN Women goodwill ambassador; in 2015, she was named on the Time 100 list of world’s most influential people, and last year she continued to make headlines by, for example, leaving feminist books around the London Underground system.

None of that may appear very remarkable: Watson isn’t the first film star to double as a political activist. But few stars can have been as reassuring or inclusive in their consciousness-raising. When Angelina Jolie and Leonardo DiCaprio signed up to humanitarian and environmental causes, for instance, they were already untouchably glamorous demigods whose lives seemed a million miles away from their fans’, and whose jet-setting activism seemed almost as distant. Watson is different. She may have flown to Bangladesh, Uruguay and Zambia on behalf of the UN, but she doesn’t come across as if she is lecturing her fans from on high – more as if she is learning alongside them.

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The first reason for this is that Watson’s fans feel, with some justification, that they know her. Not only have they watched her growing up onscreen in eight blockbusters, but they have heard her admit that the character she played in those blockbusters was just like her. In an interview with feminist author bell hooks in Paper magazine, she said that when she started reading JK Rowling’s novels, at the age of eight, “the character of Hermione gave me permission to be who I was, ” ie, “the girl in school whose hand shot up to answer the questions”. But when she was cast as Hermione she used her earliest interviews to deny she was that girl: “At first I was really trying to say, ‘I’m not like Hermione. I’m into fashion and I’m much cooler than she is, ’ and then I came to a place of acceptance. Actually, we do have a lot in common. There are obviously differences, but there are a lot of ways that I’m very similar. And I stopped fighting that!”

If Watson-watchers believe she is just as earnest, studious and intelligent as Hermione, then, they have her permission. Whereas so many former child stars have shattered their youthful images, either by going off the rails in their personal lives (eg, Drew Barrymore) or choosing to play edgy, sexualised roles on film (eg, Dakota Fanning), Watson has been brave enough to carry on being the school swot. The youngsters who identified with her when they saw her in Harry Potter and the Philosopher’s Stone in 2001 can feel that she has yet to let them down, nearly 16 years later.

Even her activism is bound up with that swottiness. Rather than manning the barricades, Watson has focused on reading, discussion, and chronicling her studies on social media, thus making them accessible in a way that would once have been impossible. Last year, she set up a Goodreads online book club, Our Shared Shelf, which recommends a text to its 168, 000 members every two months. Its current book is Eve Ensler’s The Vagina Monologues. “There is so much amazing stuff out there, ” Watson enthuses on the club’s homepage. “Funny, inspiring, sad, thought-provoking, empowering! I’ve been discovering so much that, at times, I’ve felt like my head was about to explode.”

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Again, these are hardly the pronouncements of a Tinseltown divinity, but the sincere effusions of someone who is