The Subject College Co-Ed Emma Watson Had Trouble With Is Pole Dancing

Emma Watson underwent a bad girl makeover for the mag. (Mark Seliger/GQ)The sensible and studious Hermione Granger would surely roll her eyes at this.

Emma Watson, who played one of Harry Potter's best pals for a decade, spent some time indulging in a very un-Hermione-like pastime in preparation for her upcoming, more mature movie, Sofia Coppola's "The Bling Ring."

"I did learn to pole dance for the film, and I have a small pole dancing scene," Watson explained to British GQ. "But it's not a performance for anyone else, it's just me messing around with my friends. I took lessons."

Watson, who will be 23 on April 15, squeezed in the extra-curricular activity while studying at Oxford University. (She's a junior at Brown University in Providence, Rhode Island, this semester, where she plans to finish up her degree.)

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"I had this surreal experience where I was studying the modernists, writing about Virginia Woolf on Friday night, then driving to London for pole dancing classes on Saturday morning," she said with a laugh.

For those who were wondering, Watson managed to hold her own as a pole dancer but it wasn't easy.

"I was incredibly ungraceful at first. The upper-body strength and the core strength you nee! d to do it gracefully is crazy," she told the mag. "I take my hat off to the women who can do it. You have to be incredibly strong."

[Related: Emma Watson Channels Julia Roberts in 'Pretty Woman' on GQ Cover]

Watson has noted that most everything about the role of one of the teens who burglarized the homes of celebrities such as Paris Hilton and Orlando Bloom was a challenge. She was attracted to the project because she didn't want to limit the kind of post-"Harry Potter" roles that she's offered.

"Really I was open-minded about doing anything, but the one thing I didn't want to do was get myself into a corset because I was worried I'd never get out again," she told the mag. "I had to dive into something really different. This has been a really big departure for me; it's a really big character. That's so exciting for me because it meant I was really acting."

Check out some of Watson's moves in the trailer.

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