With last year’s “Ghostbusters” reboot and “Star Wars: The Force Awakens” having received well-documented backlash due to their female protagonists, Emma Watson thinks she understands why men aren’t more eager to embrace women as heroes on the big screen.
“It’s something they’re not used to, and they don’t like that,” the “Beauty and the Beast” star tells Marie Claire‘s Australian edition, reports Harper’s Bazaar.
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“Anything that deviates from the norm is difficult to accept,” she continues. “I think if you’ve been used to watching characters that look like, sound like, think like you, and then you see someone [unexpected] up on the screen, you go, ‘Well, that’s a girl, she doesn’t look like me. I want it to look like me so that I can project myself onto the character.'”
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This gender bias, she adds, doesn’t seem to apply to women, who appear to be equally open to films with either male of female protagonists.
“Women are great about that,” adds Watson. “We see whoever is on screen and recognize the human qualities in the man that we relate to, and there’s not such a gap. But for some reason, there’s some kind of barrier there where [men] are like, ‘I don’t want to relate to a girl.’ I think it is inherently part of the problem.”
