Fantastic Beasts’ Katherine Waterston on coping with Harry Potter mania
Until recently Katherine Waterston was an out-of-work actress waiting for a break — now she’s starring in one of the biggest films of the year. She talks to Hermione Eyre about swotting up on wand skills with Eddie Redmayne and coping with Pottermania
Katherine Waterston breezes into the breakfast room at Claridge’s, late, sleep-tousled and unrepentant about her lie-in. ‘I think my body just demanded it,’ she says. ‘It’s been a very hectic year…’
‘Hectic’ is an understatement. Waterston — delicate, milky-skinned, sporting a boyish crop — is about to be propelled to life-changing levels of fame. From next Thursday she can be seen starring alongside Eddie Redmayne in the new JK Rowling adaptation, Fantastic Beasts and Where To Find Them.
One of the most hotly anticipated films of the year, Fantastic Beasts — filmed over six months at Warner Bros Studios in Leavesden, with a budget of £182m — is part of the Harry Potter franchise, albeit in an indirect way (Redmayne plays Newt Scamander, a famous wizard who wrote a textbook that Potter studies at Hogwarts). And like anything associated with the Harry Potter writer, everything from the casting to the costumes will be pored over by fans. There are already forums dedicated to how Waterston holds her wand and the nature of her character Tina’s relationship with Redmayne’s Scamander (hints about sequels suggest marriage is on the cards). Waterston is still adjusting to the new-found levels of scrutiny: ‘I spent 15 years as an actor never having to talk about myself and my relationship to my work. It’s a private, intimate thing and sharing it is HARD.’
Not that Waterston, 36, is a Hollywood novice. You might recognise her from Steve Jobs, in which she brought buckets of heart to the role of Chrisann Brennan, the powerless mother of Jobs’ daughter. And she was unforgettable as Shasta Fay Hepworth in Paul Thomas Anderson’s Inherent Vice, a Pynchon stoner caper, delivering the immortal line to Joaquin Phoenix after a very involved sex scene: ‘This doesn’t mean we’re back together.’ After Fantastic Beasts, she will be seen with Michael Fassbender in Ridley Scott’s Alien: Covenant, out next year. The latter is the reason for her newly short hair — the rigours of space travel being what they are, her previously long tresses had to go. ‘I’ve come to really like having it short,’ she says, tugging at strands and looking at me nervously with vulnerable, intelligent eyes.
Yet she remembers once being out of work for a whole year. ‘The phone still rings, it’s just never with good news. Maybe they liked you but they didn’t want you for this part. If you’re stubborn you can make a meal out of a few crusts of bread,’ she says in her gentle East Coast US voice. ‘Sometimes I think I would have quit if I hadn’t got Inherent Vice.’ Through the tough years, her background helped. ‘What’s comforting about coming from a family of actors is I don’t have to explain the struggle. I can just sigh to my sister, “I had a bad one”, and she’ll know exactly the profound audition humiliation I am describing.’
Her father, Sam Waterston, currently co-starring alongside Jane Fonda, Lily Tomlin and Martin Sheen in Netflix’s Grace and Frankie and an Oscar nominee for The Killing Fields, appeared in Woody Allen classics such as Crimes and Misdemeanours in the 1980s, becoming a household name for the TV series Law & Order. Her half-brother, James, and sister, Elisabeth, act, as does her brother-in-law, Louis Cancelmi. It has given her a long view on fame. ‘If you have a famous parent,’ she says, ‘you know that being famous doesn’t make you superior to anyone else. It just means people smile at you more. Everyone was fawning all over my father but of course the way you look at your parents when you’re a teen is often with a… more critical eye.’ Her grandfather put it in a nutshell. ‘He said: “Fame is like smoking. It won’t hurt you if you don’t inhale.”’
She had better hold her breath when Fantastic Beasts launches in cinemas. She plays a New York witch of Jewish descent called Porpentina (‘Tina’) Goldstein, a repressed character ‘focused on her work’ as a federal wand inspector. The film is set in 1936 but her costume includes men’s trousers and an old Victorian blouse because ‘she’s very practical and doesn’t give a damn about male attention’.
This being a JK Rowling number, the film is being promoted in strict secrecy. No previews were available. So what I gather from Waterston is cryptic: she mentions ‘waving around a miraculous suitcase’, containing fantastic beasts, such as the llama-like mooncalf or the niffler, a kleptomaniac platypus. Sounds like a heavy suitcase. ‘They weighted that thing down so much. Eddie was waving it around but embarrassingly I found it considerably harder to lift…’ For all the fun special effects, she and Redmayne behaved like committed thespians. ‘Maybe we’re both nerds, but we both felt such a responsibility to the pre-existing audience. Even when we were doing screwball stuff, we were both attacking it in a serious way.’
That included working with wand coach Alex Reynolds. ‘When I first heard about that, I thought, “Are you kidding?”’ she says. ‘Then I met Alex and was so grateful she was there.’ Reynolds previously helped Redmayne with the physicality of playing Stephen Hawking in The Theory of Everything and again with The Danish Girl. ‘She had us really engage with what we were trying to use the wands for. Because you can feel like such a jackass with a stick in your hand.’ They also studied the Harry Potter films. ‘I know Eddie did steal something outright from Emma Watson — that spell she casts on her parents is so delicate and beautiful…’
It was a ‘tremendous relief’ to Waterston when Rowling tweeted celebrating her casting. ‘The minute you get cast you worry they’ve made the most terrible mistake. There’s a really awkward stage between being hired and doing the job when it doesn’t feel real.’ The first time she met Rowling was on set, mid-shoot. ‘I think they held her off from coming because they were worried production would grind to a halt… which it did. Eddie and I were like moths to a flame, we just circled her, staring. We wanted to be near her but then didn’t know what to say. And she was kind and sweet enough to pretend something really uncomfortable and strange wasn’t happening.'
Waterston was actually born in London, at the Chelsea and Westminster Hospital. ‘My dad was here shooting a BBC mini-series in which he played [J Robert] Oppenheimer, who invented the atomic bomb. So for years my parents called me “the Oppenheimer baby”,’ she deadpans. ‘Which was nice’. Her mother, Lynn Louisa Woodruff, was a model. ‘The only way my mother’s beauty really affected me was that I always assumed that some day I would look like her. Then late in my teens I looked at a photo of her when she was younger than I was then, and I realised, no, it’s never going to happen.’
Waterston attended prestigious Connecticut boarding school Loomis Chaffee, which sounds a little like Hogwarts. ‘I wanted some independence from my family, not just my parents — I didn’t feel I had my own identity, I was so often part of a pack. So going off to a big school was really freeing. I loved it, but there’s a very competitive atmosphere at boarding school, a constant low-level pressure to achieve.’ Six-foot tall and athletically built, she was encouraged to do long-distance running, ‘when I really wanted to be playing team games. I spent a lot of time hiding in the darkroom’.
After training at Tisch School of Arts at NYU (and spending a happy six months in London at RADA) she put in the years off-Broadway, appearing in new writing by the Pulitzer-nominated playwright Adam Rapp, who was also her partner for six years. A New Yorker, she is not at home in LA. ‘When you drive through Los Angeles you see the wreckage of the industry everywhere. I find it so haunting. You’ll go to a café and see a 65-year-old woman who showed up there aged 19 with big hopes. That place holds them like a purgatory, they can’t get out but they can’t really thrive there either.’
