Emma Watson aka Hermione, geeky, perfect and Best Friend Forever of Harry Potter the infamous movie boy-wizard, has just shorn off her hair.

“I’ve been wanting to do this since I was 16,” she tells Life! in an interview at the swish Berkley Hotel in London.

“But I couldn’t because of the films. I couldn’t wear a wig. It wouldn’t look natural on someone my age.”

The homeschooled daughter of lawyers and current second-year student at Brown University, Rhode Island, had apparently walked into a New York salon alone, emerging from it two hours later minus 30cm of hair – and completely unrecognisable to the paparazzi.

“I was very calm,” she says.

Is this part of a whole new butch look?

“Butch?” she returns, bemused but slightly frowning.

“I think it’s rather gamine actually, rather feminine,” she says. “I’ve never felt sexier. I love it, this new hair.”

“Having been with the film all this way, it made sense to continue to the end,” she says now. “It’s finished exactly the way I imagined for Hermione – with Ron, the kids, her causes, everything.”

HP7, Watson says, echoing co-star Daniel Radcliffe, is a “road movie”.

“It was good to get out of Hogwarts, run off in search of Voldemort in Scotland and bits of very beautiful English countryside,” she says. “But a lot of it was actually shot in a tent in the studio.”

“Well, we wore quite a few prosthetics and the make-up is always very good,” she says. “But I hear a lot of it will be CGI, so I’ll only be able to see for myself the same time as everyone else. It’s interesting to see how they made the children look like us too.”

“I think normality is underrated,” she says. “It took two weeks for everyone to get used to the idea of having an actress in class. But after that, everyone realised that I was just Emma, normal Emma.”

Life these days, she adds, is the unlikely bliss of squeezing four in a dormitory, “mulling over pizza on a Friday night.”

“Oh no, I’m still very much a Brit – people expect me to come back with an American accent but I haven’t,” she says.

“But it’s interesting you’ve pointed out that I’ve experienced three very different kinds of education – homeschooling, Hogwarts and now Brown. It’s made me look at the UK, at Europe, in a new way. You see things from the outside in. I guess everything you go through in life is a learning process.”

“Well, my immediate plans are to get through three more years of this course,” she says. “But if something interesting comes along during the summer holidays, a bit of theatre, maybe a good film, I’m open to the idea.”

Today, she is waxing lyrical over a jumper. “This thing I’m wearing, it’s ever so incredible, the most comfortable thing on earth,” she says, tugging at a baggy, cotton-knit top around her neck, just about exposing – the horror – a bra strap.

“Feel it, feel it,” she urges, as you tentatively grab at a patch of white fuzz.

“This is what I wear all the time in the dorm,” she adds. “This is me – and I’m still me, you know? Someone asked me if my new haircut means I was coming out, like, out. Was I a lesbian?”

“That was so funny. I just laughed out loud.”

“It’s funny how everyone thinks of you differently now, and of course, you do feel different. The wardrobe is slightly different too, now that you mention it,” she says.

“But hair is very changeable, you know. It can always grow back. And you can always cut it off again.”

On meeting herself as Hermione Granger at the opening of the Wizarding World of Harry Potter theme park in Orlando this June - "It's definitely strange seeing a ghost - a hologram - of yourself in full size, real-life, up close."

On her 10-year bond with co-actors Daniel Radcliffe and Rupert Grint in the Potter films - "After all we've been through together, I don't think anything can tear us apart. We're really really tight."