Emma Watson Beauty And The Beast Roll

If you weren't already looking forward to the upcoming live-action remake of Disney's Beauty and the Beast, this new teaser is sure to get you excited.

In one of the most iconic clips from the film, Emma Watson gives us a true listen to her singing skills while performing Belle.

We watch as she makes her way through the tiny poor provincial town,  as she does every morning, grabbing rolls from the baker with his tray (like always) and skipping over the pond. She passes the boys as they head into school and women doing laundry, convinced her head's up on some cloud, on her way to return her latest romance novel.

Watch: Emma Watson Sings In 'belle' Clip From Beauty And The Beast'

It's something I really grappled with at the beginning: the Stockholm-syndrome question, she told Entertainment Weekly in their Feb. 24/March 3 issue. That's where a prisoner will take on the characteristics of and fall in love with the captor.

She has none of the characteristics of someone with Stockholm syndrome because she keeps her independence; she keeps that freedom of thought, Watson explained. I also think there is a very intentional switch where, in my mind, Belle decides to stay. She's giving him hell. There is no sense of 'I need to kill this guy with kindness.' Or any sense that she deserves this. In fact, she gives as good as she gets. He bangs on the door, she bangs back. There's this defiance that 'You think I'm going to come and eat dinner with you and I'm your prisoner—absolutely not.' 

She continued,  The other beautiful thing about the love story is that they form a friendship first. There is this genuine sharing, and the love builds out of that, which in many ways is more meaningful than a lot of love stories, where it was love at first sight. They are having no illusions about who the other one is. They have seen the worst of one another, and they also bring out the best.

Wactch] 'beauty And The Beast' Review: It's A Disney Musical Beauty

Watson has been very vocal about the changes that she made to her character with director Bill Condon—from her costumes to her career—wanting Belle to exude feminist characteristics as a role model for young women.

She remains curious, compassionate and open-minded. And that's the kind of woman I would want to embody as a role model, given the choice, Watson explained in an interview with Total Film. There's this kind of outsider quality that Belle had, and the fact she had this really empowering defiance of what was expected of her. In a strange way, she challenges the status quo of the place she lives in, and I found that really inspiring.

She continued, She manages to keep her integrity and have a completely independent point of view. She's not easily swayed by other people's perspective—not swayed by fear-mongering or scapegoating.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

Beauty And The Beast Inspired Rosetree Necklace

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.

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.

The Winners And Losers Of Emma Watson's 'beauty And The Beast' Press Tour

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

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.

Luke Evans Cast As Gaston Opposite Emma Watson In Disney's 'beauty And The Beast'

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.

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!”

Costume Lovers — Emma Watson In The Beauty And The Beast 2017

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