Team Dragonstone

“When we kill women in our stories, we aren’t just annihilating female gendered bodies. We are annihilating the feminine as a force wherever it resides — in women, in men, of the natural world. Because what we really mean when we say we want strong female leads is: “Give me a man but in the body of a woman I still want to see naked. It’s difficult for us to imagine femininity itself — empathy, vulnerability, listening — as strong. When I look at the world our stories have helped us envision and then erect, these are the very qualities that have been vanquished in favor of an overwrought masculinity. I don’t believe the feminine is sublime and the masculine is horrifying. I believe both are valuable, essential, powerful. But we have maligned one, venerated the other, and fallen into exaggerated performances of both that cause harm to all. How do we restore balance? Or how do we evolve beyond the limitations that binaries like feminine/masculine present in the first place?”

• She felt undeserving when she was appointed as UN Women goodwill ambassador and sought out Gloria Steinem to learn about feminist activism.
• She thinks the criticism she received for being a white feminist was useful because it made her educate herself.
• She says there’s a desperate need to reform the education system in the UK to change the way they are taught the history of how Britain has been involved in foreign affairs and how they profited from slavery.
• She felt anxious about approaching 30 because there’s a lot of pressure to have a husband and a baby by then and she’s still figuring her life out.
• She was so young when she was casted in Harry Potter that she doesn’t remember much of her life before it and she went to therapy to deal with her issues with fame. She used to feel very guilty for being unhappy because she thought she should enjoy fame more.
• The interviewer is a transgender woman and they discuss transgender issues for a while. Emma is in regular contact with a trans child which makes the topic of trans rights emotional for her because she’s very anxious for this kid’s safety.
• She talks about her role as Meg March in the new Little Women movie and defends that unlike what many people say choosing to be a wife and a mother doesn’t make Meg a less feminist character and quotes a line from the movie, “Just because my dreams are different than yours it doesn’t mean they are unimportant.”  
• She wishes more people would realize she’s not Hermione Granger but also understands why they want to see that in her because Hermione is a symbol for her too.
• She used to think she could never be happy without a partner and now that she has learnt to navigate that better and is genuinely happy single she’s started to think of herself as self - partnered in contrast to the time when she thought of herself as single = lonely.

I never thought, growing up, I could really achieve my dreams, no matter how hard I worked. So when I did, I was, like, “Well, this could all end tomorrow, so I better do something good with it while it lasts.” I’ve got a voice and I don’t necessarily have all the ideas, but I do have a platform from which to spread it.

Emmy award winner Jodie Comer