Fantastic Beasts and Where to Find Them star Katherine Waterston has cast a spell on the movie world
THIS is the female star of JK Rowling’s Fantastic Beasts and Where to Find Them, who is bewitching the movie world right now.
THERE was a time where, unlike every other actor in New York, Katherine Waterston couldn’t get arrested in an episode of Law & Order.
This despite the fact her father Sam Waterston was the long-running crime drama’s resident DA, Jack McCoy.
How the 36-year-old made it from that sorry state to where she is now — waving a wand alongside Eddie Redmayne as the heroine of J.K. Rowling’s new wizarding blockbuster Fantastic Beasts and Where To Find Them and running away from whatever space terrors Ridley Scott could throw at her in next year’s Alien: Covenant — is a magic trick Harry Potter himself would have a hard time figuring out.
“There are all kinds of victories and failures when you’re at the beginning of your career as an actor,” says the thoughtful and warm Waterston. “Moments when you get a great job and it comes out and nobody goes to see it! Or you don’t get a job you really want and it devastates you for a week, but a week later you get a better job and you’re so grateful the first people didn’t like you.
“It’s only in retrospect that you can identify these moments where a real shift happens in a career. But as it’s happening, it’s much more varied than that. There are great months and s---ty months.
“Sometimes it’s you don’t get a job but someone says, ‘Don’t f---ing give up, you’re good at this’ — something that keeps you going but isn’t quantifiable if you look at an IMDb page or a bio.”
In Hollywood’s current draft of the Waterston bio, her breakthrough is pinpointed as last year’s Inherent Vice, the wild Paul Thomas Anderson caper in which she wove an intoxicating spell of sex and chaos as Joaquin Phoenix’s mysterious ex.
The spells she’s casting in Fantastic Beasts and Where To Find Them are of an entirely different nature and on an entirely different level.
With Rowling penning the script herself, Fantastic Beasts opens a new window into the wizarding world, set 70 years prior to the Potter stories.
Centred on Newt Scamander (Redmayne), who Potterfiles know is destined to write the textbook on magical creatures that is a fixture of every Hogwarts student’s desk, it’s the first of what Rowling has declared will be five movie adventures.
Newt arrives in 1920s New York, a time of great tension between the magic community and the no-maj — the American word for “muggles”. In his suitcase, Newt carries the beasts he’s collected in his travels. When some of the creatures escape, chaos erupts in the city.
On the scene to haul in the English interloper for his infractions is Waterston’s overly officious Porpentina “Tina” Goldstein, a witch looking to get back in the good graces of her bosses at the Magical Congress of the United States of America.
“One of the great messages of the film is that there’s so much more to people than initially meets the eye,” Waterston says. “When you first meet Tina, she’s in a rough patch at work and feels insecure, but she’s trying to fake it ’til she makes it back to her old position.
“In the beginning she’s performing for Newt a little, trying to convince him she’s really tough. I really responded to that internal struggle between her confidence and insecurity.”
Coming to grips with Tina’s wand took practice, the actor admits. “Practice I didn’t think I’d need!” Unlike wielding a prop gun, she says, a wand requires a “suspension of disbelief”.
While Redmayne had watched on with some envy last decade as many of his peers won roles in the original Potter franchise, Waterston had no real emotional link to the world before winning the Fantastic Beasts role.
Yet she was well aware of the Potter effect: “I saw people fall into those stories, like my little brother when he read the books he didn’t come out of his room for weeks.”
She finally came to understand the “intensely personal” fans have to the world while filming Fantastic Beasts.
After each day on set, she’d head home at night and devour a few more pages of Rowling’s published works.
“I was completely immersed, day and night.”
FANTASTIC BEASTS AND WHERE TO FIND THEM OPENS THURSDAY
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