It was a pretty bewildering time,” says Katherine Waterston – hovering, for a moment, in the memory of 2016. It was a moment of transition for the American actor: after a breakthrough performance in the sativa haze of Paul Thomas Anderson’s hippy-death daydream Inherent Vice, Waterston had secured what remains her biggest mainstream role – a lead part in the Harry Potter prequel Fantastic Beasts and Where to Find Them. “Everybody else up for that part were huge stars; I never thought I was going to get it,” she says. “Honestly, it was hard to catch up with the rate at which my life had changed at that time. I really didn’t know what I was doing in a big franchise.”
Today, it’s hard to imagine Waterston feeling so ill-suited to the limelight. It may be that the mise en scene is to blame: appropriately glammed-up for a run of video interviews this afternoon, the 44-year-old sits a few feet away from me in a central London hotel room, lights and cameras aimed squarely at her face. Around us a team of technical hands and publicists form a human skirting board. The setup, she admits, is “terrifying – but then you realise they’re not out to get you and it’s not so bad”. I’m pretty sure this is just for my benefit: she seems right at home.
It was during this first venture into the land of blockbusters (Fantastic Beasts) that Waterston got to grips with “the business” of cinema. “I started in the theatre, where you don’t have to understand the business at all, really,” she says. “There’s no business, in fact – no one’s making any money!” After this, there were Beasts sequels, films with Ridley Scott (a starring role in Alien: Covenant), Steven Soderbergh (Logan Lucky), and Damien Chazelle (Babylon). There’s an elegant complexity to her work across the board – a kind of shifting, hard-to-define strength, like molten steel, and a world-weary sadness that’s as present when she’s fighting Alien xenomorphs as it is in nuanced indie projects such as 2020’s The World to Come, or last year’s The End We Start From.
Her latest role is in the Paramount+ series The Agency, a thoughtful spy thriller adapted from the French drama Le Bureau des Légendes (2015-2020). Waterston plays a skilled, emotionally oblique handler in an organisation responsible for long, deep-cover espionage operations; Michael Fassbender plays a spy with a potentially compromising love life. “Espionage stories generally either celebrate that world by presenting it as very glamorous,” she says, “or they have a very cynical view of it. The Agency felt like a really holistic, honest portrayal of both sides – it’s honest, and authentic.”
The series marks the third time Waterston and Fassbender have worked together. She played Chrisann Brennan, mother to the daughter of Fassbender’s tech tycoon in the 2015 biopic Steve Jobs, with Fassbender also starring as a pair of eerie androids in Alien: Covenant. “Actors are usually in a sort of first date state with their co-stars,” Waterston says. “Just when you start to really understand somebody, how they work, the film wraps and you never work with them again. Almost in every case. But with Michael, you have this ineffable thing going in – a trust there, a history.
“I fantasise sometimes about the days of the studio system,” she continues, “which has its undeniable downsides… but actors had to work together in multiple films. It meant you could jump off in the deep end and get into the work faster.”
There is in fact something quite Old Hollywood about Waterston, a certain poised erudition. She smiles widely, and frequently, but has a well-keeled sincerity – to make a point, she arches her eyebrows, widens her eyes. And she has a penchant for simile. “An actor in film and TV is kind of like a blindfolded painter,” she says. “What artist would do all their paintings blindfolded and then let them hang them on the wall, asking somebody else if they’re good? But that’s what we do.”
Any thespian grandeur is undercut, however, by a tendency for wry self-deprecation – when, for instance, she harangues herself for overusing the word “holistic”. “I am so obsessed with directors and great writing,” she says at one point. “That makes me totally unique, right? No other actor cares about these things...”
Waterston was a child of show business, the daughter of former model Lynn Louisa Woodruff and Sam Waterston, the decorated actor of Law & Order fame. She decided she wanted to be an actor when she was “very, very small. I remember looking at myself in a full-length mirror and saying, ‘You’re going to be an actor.’ I was a weird kid.”
Many have noted Waterston’s refusal to trade on her family name during those early years of rejection and hard graft. She grew up in Connecticut, and studied at the Tisch School of the Arts at New York University, the Stella Adler Studio of Acting, and the Royal Academy of Dramatic Art in London. But her father’s experience had its benefits too. “When you have family in the business, they’ve been through a lot of the things you go through,” she says. “So if I had a humiliating audition – and I had so many – he was very sympathetic to what I was going through.
“I have so many friends whose parents would be like, ‘So you don’t have a job right now? You’re not really trying…’ They don’t understand. But that was really wonderful – and then just being able to nerd out [with her father], with these incredible long conversations about communicating character.”
Waterston cut her teeth in the theatre (in plays such as Kindness by Adam Rapp, Leslye Headland’s Bachelorette, and a revival of The Cherry Orchard), clawing her way through years of small projects, bit-parts and dispiriting screen auditions before she finally made it in the movies. It was her first film role, in the 2007 independent film The Babysitters, that brought her to the attention of Paul Thomas Anderson, the first filmmaker to fully utilise her star power. (Anderson’s eye for leftfield casting remains peerless: see also Alana Haim in Licorice Pizza, or Vicky Krieps in Phantom Thread.) As Inherent Vice’s Shasta Fay Hepworth, the missing ex-“old lady” of Joaquin Phoenix’s hippy gumshoe, Waterston was a revelation.
“Inherent Vice sort of ruined me for like a decade,” Waterston admits, wistfully. “Because I was looking for the structure and feel of [Anderson’s] film set everywhere I went. Everything’s the best. You name it, he’s doing it the best way. But you cannot recreate that. He’s got a crew of people who grew up together, making films together for 20-plus years. People have fallen in love, got married and had children in that crew. Everybody there is so proud to be there and it’s palpable in the air. I also don’t know how he does it, but it is the safest place that I can imagine working.”
Fantastic Beasts was, inevitably, a different vibe, a big and fan-frenzied production that cast Waterston as witch Tina Goldstein (complete with transatlantic accent – again, very Old Hollywood). “The challenge, always, in those larger scale projects is to try to hang on to the person that you were when you were doing theatre for 20 people,” she says. “The work is meant to be the same – and those big machines sometimes don’t serve to remind you of that.” That, she explains, is when you “cling onto your co-stars, because they’re trying to do the same thing.” (In this case, that included Eddie Redmayne, Dan Fogler and Alison Sudol.)
You feel yourself as an animal when you become a parent. It’s shocking
The franchise came juddering to a halt just three films into a five-film masterplan; after a hugely profitable first outing, the film series was beset by middling reviews, mounting backlash to the “gender critical” rhetoric of creator JK Rowling, and a protracted controversy around Johnny Depp, who played the villain in the first two films before his role was re-cast in the third. (Waterston has previously made clear her support of trans rights, telling The Independent that she wanted to avoid being “grouped in with other people’s views by association”.) I ask if she felt any disappointment over the way the franchise ended. “No,” she says. There is a long silence. “Things happen, and you move on.”
Waterston recently had a small role in the Armando Iannucci-produced series The Franchise, which depicted the nightmarish production of a fictitious blockbuster, complete with rampant studio interference and creative prevarication. Is this sort of satire true to life, I wonder? Waterston replies slowly, carefully, and in pointedly generalised terms. “I do think it’s accurate,” she says.
“I think communication is really difficult when there’s that many moving parts. And the managing of money at that level – there can be a lot of waste and recklessness. Then other projects at the same scale can be run really well – so you know it’s not an indictment of every large-scale production. But yeah, there’s a lot of things in The Franchise that were familiar to me.” She flashes a big grin, and makes a sort of teetering-scales motion with her palms. “Careful, now. Careful.”
“There is a slight interrogation element to your style,” Waterston tells me, in jest, a few minutes later. “Which I’m not minding! But I feel like I might have a lie detector strapped around my chest.” Without the aid of such a device, I won’t say she’s lying – but I’d argue her impression of my interviewing has more to do with the bright, scrutinising lights overhead (and the circle of onlookers) than any Paxmanesque prodding from me. She may be exercising some caution in her replies, but she’s also far from difficult. Interviewers have long noted Waterston’s habit of long, pensive silences while answering questions; today, this hasn’t been the case at all. All the same, Waterston is good at giving away only as much as she wants to say. Her private life, for instance, is mostly a sealed vault. What we do know is that she now lives in London, and had a son in 2019, the name and paternity of whom are not publicly shared.
Parenthood changed Waterston’s perspective on some of her past work – in ways you might not necessarily expect. “I felt a lot of regret and shame about having portrayed mothers before I became one,” she says. “I had been too nonchalant. I never treated it like I do with this job, for instance, thinking ‘OK, I’m playing as a CIA operative; I have a lot of research to do. I didn’t treat motherhood that way. I thought, ‘I have a mother. I’ve observed her for a long time.’ I had friends and a sister who were mothers, so I figured I’d sort of ‘gotten it’ by osmosis.”
She singles out Steve Jobs as a project she would “love” to redo. “My character in that film had a palpable undercurrent of rage about how she was being treated. Now? I feel like I didn’t play it hard enough at all. If my heating wasn’t working, and the man who was denying paternity to my child was making millions… I mean, let me at him! You feel yourself as an animal when you become a parent. It’s shocking.”
Waterston also points out that the passing years have brought a change in how people discuss her own work with her. “I was thinking about this this morning,” she muses. “I don’t know when it happens, but one day, you suddenly have a body of work. You go from being the new kid on the scene, trying to convince people that you deserve to take up space in the business, and then something shifts, and it changes the way people treat you on set.
“I’m ageing all the time and so the roles and the things that interest me change as I grow, and grow up. Well, sort of grow up.” She pauses. “But I also think the industry is changing in a wonderful way. There’s still a long way to go, but I’ve had a lot of really happy experiences where it hasn’t felt like I was getting the short end of the stick because I was a woman. And that’s changed.” She smiles again. “Over the past 15 years – that’s changed a lot.”
‘The Agency’ premieres in the UK today, with two episodes available to stream exclusively on Paramount+
