"Beauty and the Beast" star Emma Watson has revealed that she was told to refrain from using "feminism" in her UN speech, but the 25-year-old-just like her character Hermione Granger in "Harry Potter"-has shown her stubborn streak.

In an interview with Porter magazine, via The Evening Standard, Emma Watson said that she "was encouraged" against using the word "feminism" since some people thought "it was alienating and separating and the whole idea of the speech was to include as many people as possible."

"But I thought long and hard and ultimately felt that it was just the right thing to do. If women are terrified to use the word, how on earth are men supposed to start using it?" she said.

In hindsight, Emma Watson played her cards right because her now famous UN feminism speech propelled the "Beauty and the Beast" actress into the forefront of the advocacy for gender equality, and also led her to found an advocacy to include men into also making their contribution to women's rights.

"[I've] spent more than half of my life pretending to be someone else. While my contemporaries were dying their hair and figuring out who they were, I was figuring out who Hermione was and how best to portray her," she recounted.

"Now at 25, for the first time in my life I feel like I have a sense of self that I'm comfortable with. I actually do have things that I want to say and I want to be my most authentic self."

"Beauty and the Beast" star Emma Watson said that her advocacy for feminism is "the harder road to tread, but without a doubt, ultimately the most rewarding."

"It sounds like a ridiculous thing to say, but I'm very interested in truth, in finding ways to be messy and unsure and flawed and incredible and great and my fullest self, all wrapped into one," Emma Watson added. "When you watch the work of someone like actress Emma Thompson, you feel like you're seeing something true, and I aspire to that."