Emma Watson turns 36 on April 15, and the quiet life she has built looks nothing like the one the world once scripted for her. The girl who spent a decade as the brightest witch of her age—filming under klieg lights and delivering 16-page character essays while one co-star wrote a single page and the other wrote none—has, in recent years, chosen something far more radical than fame: intentionality. Since wrapping Little Women in 2018, she has traded red carpets for Oxford’s dreaming spires, where she is pursuing a DPhil in Creative Writing at New College, and also co-founded Renais, a sustainable luxury gin brand distilled from her family’s Grand Cru grape skins in Chablis.

Watson described her previous life as having reached its lowest point—and then she did something about it. But before the doctoral thesis, the boardroom and the activism that redefined what a celebrity platform could look like, there was the screen. And a filmography that proved, with growing force and clarity, that Emma Watson was always far more than Hermione Granger.

In case you missed it: The richest member of Blackpink? How Lisa structures her investment portfolio