Katherine Waterston Talks “Fantastic Beasts” and Her Latest Movie Role

In a recent interview with /Film, Katherine Waterston gave some insight into her whirlwind life as an actress and spoke about her most recent film, State Like Sleep. Waterston plays American Auror Tina Goldstein in the Fantastic Beasts franchise.

In between filming for the Fantastic Beasts films, Waterston has continued to take roles in small-scale films. Most recently, she starred in the film State Like Sleep, where she plays a widow who is still struggling and attempting to cope with the unexpected passing of her husband.

Waterston talked about how her interest in this role came from the surprising turns that the story took when she was reading through the script for the first time.

Yeah, the scripts you read where you genuinely don’t know where something is going to go, they stand out for that reason alone. And this one certainly was one of those for me.

I thought exploring how we mourn and how we suffer in this way was very innovative but not untrue or dishonest, and that got me really excited.

She also spoke about her experience working with actor Michael Shannon (The Shape of Water, Take Shelter) for the second time.

We actually made The Current War after State Like Sleep, but I had known him for ten years before that. We’d done a workshop of a play in New York. I met him when I was 24 or 25, and I’d known him and been a huge fan, of course, of his work over the years.

All actors want to work with people who raise the bar for them, and when you’ve got a great script and great director and great co-star who says ‘Let’s take this thing that’s already good and take it further,’ it’s really exciting.

There is a similarity between Waterston and the character that she plays in State Like Sleep – they are both living very far away from home.

That’s something in the script that both Mike and I identified with. As actors, you’re always on the road, living in hotels. It can be very disorienting. Just as all travel can, it can also free your mind up a bit to see things from a different perspective. The character Katherine is very uncomfortable being forced back into this environment against her will, but the place permits her to face a lot of things by herself that she could avoid in the comforts of home.

Finally, Waterston commented on finding other movie roles in between filming for Fantastic Beasts.

I don’t really care about the size of the part. It’s just the scripts and the characters and the people I want to work with. I did the first Fantastic Beasts and went right into Alien, and that was a lot of time away, but it was so much fun and I learned so much.

I love doing small films and try to do them whenever I can and anyone will have me, but I’m not really that calculated.

State Like Sleep can be found on Amazon Prime Video and in select theaters.

Will you be watching Katherine Waterston’s new film? Let us know in the comments!