Katherine Waterson has appeared in some of the biggest Hollywood movies including Steve Jobs, Fantastic Beasts and Where to Find Them, and most recently Alien: Covenant. But, her success in the film industry did not happen over night. In a recent interview for Interview magazine, Waterson discussed how she struggled to become an actress early on in her career and how she managed to get into character as she got older.
Waterson was asked why she doesn’t receive more recognition for her work. Waterson points towards her early days as a struggling actress in New York City and trying to make it.
“Self-promotion is not my strong suit, for sure. I don’t look down on it; I just don’t understand how to do it. All those years working and not working in New York—sure, it was painful, but it was also such a personal process for me because no one was paying attention. Obviously, that was difficult financially, but I’m grateful I was left alone with my work for a number of years. It’s more pleasant not to have to defend or explain yourself so much. A lot of what we do is hard to put into words. And I find that I come up short or disappoint myself in trying to even talk about it. There’s an attitude in Hollywood that those are the tough years, and these are the breezy, easy years, but it’s actually a little more complicated than that. The hell of rejection and panicking about whether you’ve really fucked it all up by pursuing a life in the arts, that stuff’s tough, but there’s also a wonderful solace in it. You get to be alone with your work.”
Watterson explains that her commitment to getting into character is what personifies her as an actress.
She says, “I think everything happens organically. You mine for clues. It’s all immersive and stuff you can use comes out of that immersion. I don’t really like to wear wigs in movies because I like to look like the character all the time. But the big one with that movie was the costumes. When I went for the first fitting, [the costume designer] Colleen Atwood had pulled some skirts and stuff. And as we started working on it, I asked to try on some men’s trousers and then we developed this idea that everything my character wore was stuff that was in her parents’ closet. She had been orphaned as a child, but lived in her parents’ old apartment. So I figured, because she couldn’t really give a damn or be bothered to buy herself anything, she’d be in some modified outfit of her parents. We had some men’s trousers and took them in at the waist and that made them too short. And then with these men’s shoes, which were just a little bit too big for me, it changed the way that I moved. Costumes so often change how you feel. I would normally never be caught dead in a skirt nearly as short as the stuff that I wore in Inherent Vice. But when you find yourself in one, it completely changes you. “
