Out of Character

Getting out of a car in transparent underwear is a statement, whether you intend it as one or not. Emma Watson, photographed by Ellen von Unwerth for a spread that arrived in early 2009, seemed to intend it entirely.

Von Unwerth is a German photographer with a long history of making women look like they’re having exactly the kind of fun that fashion photography usually sanitizes out. Her work has this consistent warmth underneath the theatricality—the images feel staged but never cold. The Watson shoot leans into her trademark aesthetic fully: vintage dresses, a dancer, an actual bird, and a visual register somewhere between Charlie Chaplin and the sad clowns of a Cirque du Soleil production, which sounds completely insane and somehow works.

Watson was still primarily Hermione to most of the world at this point—the brilliant, slightly insufferable know-it-all who made being the smartest person in the room look like the best possible life. Watching her step into a von Unwerth frame, comfortable and self-possessed and clearly not thinking about wands, was genuinely disorienting in the best way. Not because she was performing something new, but because she wasn’t performing at all. That reads in a photograph. She was twenty, and she looked like she knew exactly what she was doing. Respect.