Katherine Waterston: ‘I need everything to disappear around me’

Fifteen minutes into my interview with Katherine Waterston, she suddenly stops mid-answer and pauses for some time. “You’re coming at me on a funny day,” she says with a chuckle but a furrowed brow. “I’ve been sanding my floors all day . . . and I was contemplating press interviews and how complicated they are for me. I find them really tricky on so many levels.”

It’s a surprising confession from someone who is hardly a stranger to the media spotlight and seems a relaxed and amiable presence. The daughter of beloved American actor Sam Waterston, she came to fame starring opposite Joaquin Phoenix in 2014’s Inherent Vice and is the heroine of the Harry Potter Fantastic Beasts prequels.

This brings with it an unusual amount of fan attention: a YouTube video dedicated to her character titled “Tina Goldstein being adorable for almost eight minutes” accrued more than 700,000 hits before being removed for copyright reasons. “It’s not my first rodeo,” the 41-year-old British-American actress acknowledges. “I can’t believe I find this so hard.”

The mood of introspection is understandable — we are both deep into a London lockdown at the end of a long winter — and strangely fitting for the film we have met on Zoom to discuss, Mona Fastvold’s downbeat period romance The World to Come (now due for UK cinema release after months of delays).

Waterston plays Abigail, a stifled but stoic woman living in a kind of permanent lockdown in 19th-century New York state, her existence a punishing rustic routine of milking, mending, feeding and foraging. No Ocado or Netflix here. Her loving but unsmiling workaholic husband Dyer (played with customary laconic charm by Casey Affleck) is her only companion. The recent death of their only child casts a pall over the film.

Into this unsplendid isolation arrives the transformative Tallie, herself unhappily married but brimming with confidence. Embodied by Vanessa Kirby, she swaggers on to the screen like a Pre-Raphaelite vision. The two women’s first meeting is electric and every meeting thereafter pulses with increasing voltage.

Casting is key: Kirby’s bright-eyed, searing presence is in stark contrast to Affleck’s low-watt energy. For Abigail’s birthday Dyer lavishes her with raisins, a needle case and a tin of sardines; Tallie brings her the atlas of the world for which she has been yearning.

Obviously there’s tremendous pushback when you have a low-budget film with two female leads that’s about feelings

“They’re two women ready for a different kind of world,” observes Waterston. But — as the film’s title suggests — it is one that does not yet exist. Instead, we are invited into Abigail’s inner world through a diaristic voiceover whose litany of mundane daily duties is interrupted by entries that quietly convey her frustration and fervour. “From my earliest youth I was like a pot-bound root, curling in on itself,” she declares. Waterston notes: “One interpretation is she’s shy, but I think she’s talking about the limitations of her life and her place in the world.”

Among those limitations are the harsh conditions inflicted by the natural surroundings. Fastvold insisted that filming in rural Romania be split into two parts so she could capture the changing demands of the seasons — a decision that lends the film a novelistic sense of time passing but required extra funding for a project that was already a hard sell.

“Obviously there’s tremendous pushback when you have a low-budget film with two female leads that’s about feelings,” Waterston says. “It’s really hard to convince anyone to give you the money to start shooting in the summer, stop shooting, come back. Mona really fought for it.”

But the resulting verisimilitude was a boon for the cast. “That was really helpful,” Waterston says. “Today the mud sticking to my boots, tomorrow the mud as hard as a rock. Knowing this land intimately, knowing what it does at different times of the year. Anything that’s real helps.”

Something else that informed her performance was having recently become a mother. “Before I had a kid it never occurred to me when I was cast as someone who had children that I needed to do research,” she admits. “I thought: ‘Well, my siblings have children, I’ve been around a lot of kids, I was a kid once, I know what this is . . . massive mistake. I regret every performance I did before I had kids where I played a mother because I didn’t know.”

While being pregnant and having a baby became “a certain kind of research” for the role of Abigail, Waterston also had to contemplate something unthinkable for any parent: losing a child. As it happened, the shoot of The World to Come coincided with her filming the TV series The Third Day in which Jude Law, a father of six, plays a man who has lost a child.

“I remember talking to Jude about it,” she says. “The question arises: is it exploitative of yourself in some way to imagine this sort of tragedy? It’s uncomfortable and feels disgusting and almost shameful, to be honest. But on the other hand you think of everyone who’s actually been through this. You are simply someone who gets to play it and you have a responsibility to play it accurately.”

The intimacy and intensity of such a role must feel a far cry from the upscale surroundings of a CGI-heavy blockbuster set, I remark. “I don’t know if my process changes that much,” Waterston reflects. “But the little kid in you goes: ‘Wow! This is what I imagined a movie set would be like!’”

Yet while the trappings may be more luxurious, the fundamentals of acting remain the same. “You can feel the money on the bigger films: the trailers are fancy and there are lots of sets and people employed. But, ultimately, if I have a romantic scene with Eddie [Redmayne] in Fantastic Beasts, it feels exactly the same. I need everything to disappear around me and I just have to figure out how to connect with this other person.”

I ask about the painting of a London street scene that sits behind her, propped on a wooden sideboard. Like Waterston herself, it began life in London and eventually made its way back again. “My parents sent this to me. My grandmother was a painter and it’s the only painting she did that I’m in. She was a wild woman. She ran away from home to be a painter and hung out with Jackson Pollock and then went on to teach.”

Waterston is clearly full of admiration for women who strike it out alone and challenge previously accepted boundaries, and is heartened by the awards success enjoyed by female filmmakers this year.

“It feels like it’s only the beginning,” she enthuses. “In the Thirties and Forties there were only exceptions — there could be one woman at the paper because she’s Dorothy Parker and she has her funny column or she writes those biting reviews and [slipping into screwball movie mode]: ‘Y’know, we need a woman’s perspective every now and then and she’s not really a woman because she’s so tough. She sure can drink like one of the guys!’

“But now it’s starting to feel like: ‘Oh sure, everyone’s allowed to do this.’ And that’s a wonderful thing in all areas of life. Everybody should be allowed to do everything that they wish to do.”

Abigail and Tallie would no doubt agree.

‘The World to Come’ is in UK cinemas from July 23

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