“Pretty privilege is a thing... I think that girls who grew up truly pretty, a lot of them just don’t really understand that they have that. I mean, I didn’t understand really that I was cute until I wasn’t cute anymore. I didn’t understand that I’d lost a superpower. It was one I didn’t particularly want, I felt it kind of boxed me in. But it was this power that I had and then I lost it.”"It was hard for me to figure out I [thought]: Okay, if I talk about it then everybody thinks that I’m throwing my weight around. If I didn’t talk about it people were like ‘You’re so ungrateful, why are you hiding from it...’ Eventually I found a happy medium. The thing that bothers me now is when people take the wrong messages from things that I did. They’re like, ‘Oh Matilda had magic powers.’ and I’m like, 'guys it was an allegory.' Or when people are just like, ‘You’ll always be little Matilda to me.’ It’s like when you meet your mom's friends and they [say], ‘I remember when you were this big’ — it’s forever pushing you down. Or when people say that I ruined their childhoods. I get that a lot: that they’re sad that their childhoods are over now. I’m like: Yeah, that’s how that works. Now you can grow up. There are fringe benefits to growing up.""I don’t want them to think that I am ungrateful for the opportunities that I had. I don’t want them to think that I’m unhappy with where I am. I think that that’s the thing generally with my life: I’m pretty content. My childhood — I’m not going to say it was bad, because it wasn’t, but it was tumultuous at times. It was unsteady and there were times that I was sad and lonely and even when people [say], ‘The 90’s were awesome’ I’m like, ‘Yeah, but they were also the time that my mom died. They were also the time I was having panic attacks every day. I can’t look at them through rose-colored glasses."Even when Matilda came out I was severely depressed, and I would have changed places with another person in a heartbeat. Not because of Matilda, but just because I was sad because of everything else happening in my life. I will say that my 20s, relatively speaking, have been much calmer and much happier. Chasing happiness, people realize eventually, is a futile pursuit because it’s meant to happen in small doses so you don’t choke on it. It’s like holidays: If a holiday is every single day, it gets boring.""I think that it’s empowering without being cloying [or] facile — without being like, 'You’re a star, you’re perfect, you can do anything,’ which is you know a nice message but not entirely true... A lot of people were mad because at the end Matilda keeps her powers, whereas in the book she loses them because she is expending mental energy on studying. But I think that it’s also interesting that she keeps them and she chooses to do good with them [in the movie]. I think that that’s why it has prevailed. It shows how starved we are for empowered — and particularly — female characters. These characters that are young and intelligent and have power."I’m a firm believer that what girls want, more than anything, is power. I think that it’s hard to tell because it doesn’t look like what typical male power structures look like — it’s a different kind of power. It means so much to me that I was able to do that, that I was able to be a part of that: to show that it’s okay to be smart, and it’s okay to read, and it’s okay to work hard, and be yourself. I had no idea at the time that I was participating in something so great. But I think that I have come to appreciate it and it’s why it was my favorite movie that I was part of." Where Am I Now? by Mara Wilson was released on September 13, 2016.