Katherine Waterston

“I wonder sometimes if I've got in the habit of only being courageous when someone else has written the words I have to say.”

“There's kind of no rhyme or reason to what is appealing to any given actor. It just is, or it isn't. It's kind of like dating. You either connect to someone or you don't. You can't really say why.”

“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.”

“I love that feeling. I guess I love escaping my life, really. I love going into another world and feeling for this amount of time that this is it, this is the world I'm going to live in. You feel it more during the rehearsal process.”

“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.”

“What appeals about the '70s is the celebration of the female form, the lack of constriction.”

“Acting is a community where you come in and out of each other's lives. I'm slightly envious of the Golden Age of Hollywood. It must have been frustrating to be owned by the studio, but it was also like being in a company, working with the same people, and that appeals to me.”

“I feel like most actors just dig and dig and work and work in whatever way they do to try to do as much as they can to portray a character in the limited time they have to play it, whether it's six months or one month or one week of work, you know.”

“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.”

“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.”

“I have been a scrappy actor for 10-plus years, and when you're playing supporting roles, your relationship with the costume designer is very different.”

“We live in such hypersexualised yet totally prudish times. People have this expectation about everyone else's relationship to their own bodies.'Surely you must have shame about your body? Surely what's scariest for you as actor would be to stand in a room naked?' Believe me, I've been in so many more terrifying situations as a performer than that.”

“I feel a kind of permission and freedom in my work that I might not allow myself in my real life.”

“I didn't feel a specific pressure to prove myself because I had an actor in the family. I didn't feel that pressure to fill some big shoes or anything.”

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

“I've always wanted to play the villain. But the young girl is never the villain.”

“Obviously, as an actor, you have to embrace your imagination all the time, but when you're doing one of these films, you have to embrace your most childlike imagination - a sense of wonder and uninhibited playfulness.”

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

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

“When 'The Master' came around, they said they wanted to try and find a part for me, and I got a text from the casting director saying that.”