Emma Watson Slams Hollywood’s ‘Impossible’ Beauty Standards

Emma Watson is getting candid about Hollywood beauty standards.

The Harry Potter actress, 35, appeared on the Wednesday, Sept. 24, episode of the On Purpose with Jay Shetty podcast and opened up about feeling pressured to stay beautiful as an actress and shared her frustrations with the entertainment industry having standards for men.

The topic of beauty standards first came up when Shetty asked the actress about her struggles with separating her public-facing persona and acting roles from her actual personality; she explained that the former often made her feel like an “avatar I identified with, but kind of didn’t.”

“She’d become reproduced so many times over and become so loaded by all this different stuff, she became too heavy to carry. I don’t even know if I can be that bitch anymore,” she told the podcast host. “I don’t know how to live up to what I look like on the cover of a magazine. There’s such a glamorization that comes hand in hand with being a public, famous person, especially if you’re a woman.”

Elsewhere in the podcast, the Perks of Being a Wallflower star shared her admiration for Pamela Anderson for wearing little to no makeup on the red carpet and likened keeping up appearances in Hollywood to being on a game show.

“I feel so envious of my male costar who can put on a T-shirt and just show up without this whole rigmarole of becoming acceptable enough to be on camera,” she admitted. “Kudos to Pamela Anderson recently doing the thing because the amount of courage that it takes to do that, I can not begin to even express to you.”

Watson continued, “It’s wild. The expectations are insane. It’s impossible. The beauty expectations are so difficult to reach, and the bar gets raised all the time, so you’re constantly on a survivor island game show beauty nightmare.”

The actress’ comments come on the heels of her recently revealing why she stepped back from acting in a rare new interview with Hollywood Authentic published on Sept. 21. Her last film project was 2019’s Little Women.

Never miss a story — sign up for PEOPLE’s free daily newsletter to stay up-to-date on the best of what PEOPLE has to offer, from celebrity news to compelling human interest stories. 

“I think I’ll be honest and straight-forward, and say: I do not miss selling things,” she told the outlet. I found that to be quite soul-destroying. But I do very much miss using my skill-set, and I very much miss the art.”

“The most important thing, really—or the foundation of your life—is your home and friends and family,” Watson continued. “I think I worked so hard for so long that my life sort of bottomed out. So I needed to go and do some construction work. If you don’t have that, there’s a kind of mania that ensues; a kind of panic where you move from one project to the next, kind of terrified of the void in between them. You realize you don’t have a rhythm to your life.”