Quotes from Katherine Waterston

For 'Beasts,' I really wanted my character to be this sort of mushy, muscleless Muppet.

I've always enjoyed disappearing into a crowd in New York. As an actor, I love to spy, and it's hard to be a good spy if everyone is looking at you. Also, I'm pretty shy. I don't really like a lot of attention.

I love connecting with a character out of the blue, not knowing why.

Every now and then, you get lucky enough to work with some people you feel like you would take a bullet for.

I don't like to talk about things unless I have to. I don't like to talk a scene to death or overanalyze it, especially if I feel like I have some way in on my own.

I think there's an assumption when you have a parent in the business that you're given some kind of a cheat sheet at an early age. Some kind of upper hand or some kind of advanced understanding of how the whole thing functions - maybe how to operate within it. I never felt I received that cheat sheet and grew up pretty removed from the business.

I was devastated when they stopped making sailors' pants with bell bottoms. There's something sort of spirited about the way they affected a man's gait. They project something good-natured.

Being interviewed is an odd experience for me because I was an actor a long time before anyone ever asked me a question about myself. When I started being interviewed, I definitely felt I was being asked to defend or explain myself.

I really love fashion, but I feel like the older I get, the more I am drawn to the basic things in my daily life because everything else is so goofy and crazy.

That period between finishing the film and opening night is agonising. That's part of why actors go from job to job - so they don't have to live with the anxiety in the interim.

Sometimes you find yourself digging around for something useful, and you don't necessarily know what it is until you find it. Sometimes it's a word from a book that you read every day.

What's comforting about coming from a family of actors is I don't have to explain the struggle. I can just sigh to my sister, 'I had a bad one,' and she'll know exactly the profound audition humiliation I am describing.

The best way to honor real people when you play them is to try to tell the story of their dynamics and the struggles that they're dealing with rather than lose sight of the connections and personal relationships, and do a really good job at an accent.

I basically never believed that I was a commercial actor. Just because of the outcome of many auditions over time. No one hired me.

I'm overly sentimental and don't throw things away.

I think that when you are struggling as an actor, you imagine that if things were to pan out, everything in your life would change, But really, it's not so different. You're still pursuing good work. You still panic that you're doing it all wrong.

It's just a dream of the struggling actor to just have a proper shot - not just in a film that people will see, but with a character that's rich and complicated and that you can show you're capable of taking on.

I'm constantly struggling in interviews to engage and finish sentences, because I am being asked personal questions from somebody I don't know.

'Inherent Vice' was a novel that already existed, and in 'Steve Jobs,' I was playing a real person; in those situations, you do feel an added pressure to please.

I didn't find it difficult to live in the 'Inherent Vice' world or play those scenes, because they just seemed so real.

I think I really would have quit if I hadn't gotten 'Inherent Vice'. Or maybe I would have just shriveled up and died.

I feel like people assume if a character is very different than you, that means it's difficult to get into their head or into their skin.

So when things start going badly, you're invested in the characters in a way I think amplifies the horror and the fear because you're invested.