Did Emma Watson Drop A 'Beauty & The Beast' Clue?

If you've been following the news about the live-action Beauty and the Best film as closely as I have since Emma Watson was cast as Belle, then you've already heard the exciting update. On Wednesday, Dan Stevens was announced to be the Beast while Luke Evans will be playing Gaston in Disney's upcoming live-action remake of their classic animated film. Naturally, the Internet lost their collective minds, myself included, but nothing ever really feels official until Actual Princess Watson confirms it herself. That's what happened early Thursday morning, thanks to Twitter. However, when Watson confirmed Stevens and Evans' Beauty and the Beast roles, she also left some clues as to the direction that Disney is taking this film in. And she didn't even know it!

On the surface, the tweets seemed pretty straightforward. Watson included pictures of the two men in question along with encouraging messages geared toward letting her followers know exactly how excited she was to be sharing a screen with two such talented actors. I mean, there were no real surprises there. These are the first roles cast after her own, and the other two central roles of the film, so why wouldn't she be excited about it?

However, eagle-eyed and constantly suspicious fans like myself might have caught the little hints that she tossed in there about the film. Let's start with her greeting of Evans in the role of Gaston. "Bonjour," she says, because, as almost everyone knows, Beauty and the Beast is a French fairy tale. (The name Belle even means "Beauty" in French, and the classic Disney film was set in a small French village.) However, aside from the names and some accents (Lumiere's, for example), younger fans might not have truly realized that the small world Belle was looking to escape was actually in France. Thus, from Watson's tweet, I would hazard a guess that not only will filming for the movie take place in France, but we will feel the French-ness of the film like never before. Which means you should get ready to feel a lot of food envy.

Then there's Watson's tweet combined with Stevens' own tweet confirming his role as the Beast. His confirmation actually came on Thursday night, and it will make fans of last season of Big Brother snicker or groan, depending on how tired they were of hearing Caleb Reynolds say this.

To me, Beast Mode — and the image of Dan Stevens standing shocked next to pictures of buffalo — perhaps implies that the Beast won't be a Beast when Belle meets first him. Maybe, in their effort to flesh out the two characters' relationship more in the way the upcoming live-action film Cinderella seems to aspire to do, Belle and the Beast will meet long before his transformation and her eventual kidnapping. Perhaps we'll actually get a sense of what the Prince was like before he was cursed to become a Beast, aside from learning everything secondhand from a single story about his time as a human. Yes, we know that he was arrogant and selfish and that's what led to the curse — but what else? Did he have family? Goals? Motivations? Was he good to his servants, since they were all so eager to help him break the curse?

This is all still just speculation based off some innocent tweets, but I'm desperate for any news about this film at this point and I'm not afraid to make my own inferences while we wait for more names to join the cast and more information to be released. The only thing we can really say for sure at this point is that any Beauty and the Beast film starring Emma Watson is going to be the most feminist version of the tale that has ever been told, and we should all start planning to be free the day the movie is released.