St Trinian’s star at war with Emma the feminist
Emma Watson has boasted of how she turned Disney’s Beauty and the Beast into a modern feminist tale and lectured the United nations on women’s rights.
But has the Harry Potter star met her match in a fellow young British actress?
talulah Riley, 31, who shot to fame in the st trinian’s films, has attacked political activist Watson, 27, over her gender equality campaigning.
talulah supports equal rights for women, but can’t stand the way Watson’s HeForshe crusade appears to seek to eliminate differences between the sexes.
‘men and women should have equal rights, of course, but [they] are also different and there’s nothing wrong with that,’ talulah tells me. ‘We don’t have to start unifying gender in order to establish political equality.’
Last week, Watson praised mtV for abolishing the ‘best actress’ prize at its annual awards ceremony.
It handed her the ‘best actor’ gong, leading her to gush: ‘the first acting award in history that doesn’t separate nominees based on their sex says something about how we perceive the human experience.’
Riley, who has twice divorced U.s. tech billionaire Elon musk, says of Watson’s drive: ‘the HeForshe campaign creates a lot of confusion when it comes to gender equality, because people are getting stuck in a semantic argument, rather than addressing the actual issue. People are associating gender equality with being exactly the same and, of course, that’s not what it means.
‘You lose the real issue when you have that confusion.’
Riley is not afraid of antagonising powerful women. Earlier this year, she gazumped Cherie Blair on a £3 million Georgian house in London’s marylebone.
the actress, whose debut novel was well-received last year, will put the cat among the pigeons with her follow-up.
she says: ‘It’s about a group of women who conspire to take over the UK and turn it into a matriarchy.’ Look out!