Katherine Waterston is rapidly becoming one of the most interesting actresses working in Hollywood today. After making her debut in the George Clooney thriller Michael Clayton in 2007, she has gone on to work with some of cinema’s most respected directors. Last year she starred in Paul Thomas Anderson’s Inherent Vice with Joaquin Phoenix, before starring opposite Michael Fassbender in the Oscar-nominated biopicSteve Jobs. She’s set to act alongside Fassbender again in next year’s sci-fi sequel, Alien: Covenant – but for now, she’s more focused on the supernatural than the extra-terrestrial.

The 36-year-old actress has joined JK Rowling’s world of magic, starring with Eddie Redmayne and Colin Farrell in Fantastic Beasts and Where to Find Them. Set long before the era of Harry Potter, Fantastic Beasts opens in 1926 as Newt Scamander (Redmayne) has just completed a global excursion to find and document an extraordinary array of magical creatures. Arriving in New York for a brief stopover, some of Newt’s fantastic beasts escape, and he has to get help from Waterston’s strong-willed Tina, who wants to learn about the art of magic.

Waterston was drawn to the film because of her appreciation for characters who are, in their own way, outsiders.

“There’s a through-line with all the characters in this film, because they’re all oddballs!” she laughs. “And I love Tina because – and I think we can all relate to this – she’s very complicated. She has that aspect where you can feel incredibly confident in yourself, but also be filled with self-doubt and insecurity. She’s got all this hope for herself, but every time she tries to do something right, it goes wrong. So she’s wondering if she is as hopeless as other people perceive her to be. She’s living with that question when Eddie’s character comes along – he lets her try magic and it galvanises her.”

Newt is initially a cantankerous character, who likes his creatures more than people, but his friendships with characters like Tina allow both of them to open up more.

“It can be lonely being an oddball until you find other oddballs,” observes Waterston. “Their friendship is not a mere byproduct of the extreme set of circumstances they go through together; it is their common experience as outsiders that draws them to one another.”

The actress is becoming known for playing intriguing characters. In Inherent Vice, her character Shasta is an enigma, becoming a projection screen for the men around her. She’s also about to play space explorer Daniels in Ridley Scott’s Alien: Covenant, opposite Michael Fassbender – her second collaboration with the Irish actor. In Steve Jobs, Waterston played Jobs’ ex-girlfriend Chrisann Brennan, who is furious about Jobs’ refusal to acknowledge their daughter, Lisa. Frustrated and desperate, Waterston relished playing a character who was obviously being wronged, and who no longer cared to be polite about it.

“That’s what’s so brilliant about Aaron Sorkin,” the actress says of the film’s writer. “You see both perspectives of it, so sometimes you’re on Jobs’ side, and then you think, ‘Are you kidding me, motherfucker?’ It was pretty easy for me to understand her frustration, but it was really fun to play, and to act opposite Michael Fassbender.” While she and Fassbender were verbal sparring partners in Steve Jobs, she says it’s also been thrilling to work with him on the action-filled Alien: Covenant.

“I’m in awe of his talent,” she sighs admiringly. “It’s difficult to remain in awe of someone when you’re working with them, because you need to get through the day and not just sit around drooling! But there are times with him when I look at him and he’s doing something so amazing, I forget myself. At one point in Alien we’re running and he did the most amazing robot run, I was just staring at him!”

Coming after Alien is a role in Steven Soderbergh’s heist film, Logan Lucky, as well as a poetic drama, State Like Sleep. Waterston feels incredibly fortunate to be offered such a diverse range of projects.

“It is just a dream come true,” she smiles, “to be flung into different environments and play really different characters. I look at the last five jobs I’ve done and there’s very little that links these characters to one another – which is the dream. Because the fear is to only be seen in one way and to continuously revisit the same sort of character.”

The actress also loves embracing the physicality of her roles, and says that working on stunts for Alien: Covenant and Fantastic Beasts was an invigorating, if sometimes daunting, challenge.

“Ridley Scott said something that I love,” recalls Waterston, “which was, ‘Let’s shoot it, the worst that can happen is we’re wrong.’ And Fantastic Beasts really embraced that spirit of ‘Let’s try it!’, which is great because I love getting to try new things. You’re learning how to do stunts and having someone say, ‘Okay, today you’re going to run and dive under this and bend back over, then jump up and do a spell!’ You’re like ‘What? Can’t you just CGI my head on someone else’s body?’ But doing it is great. At first it’s scary, but it’s so inspiring to be surrounded by people who want to throw caution to the wind.”

Waterston herself was raised in a family where imagination and acting were greatly valued. Her father, Sam Waterston, is an Oscar-nominated actor, who is best known for his roles in Law & Order, The Newsroom and Grace and Frankie.

Waterston reveals that she watches all her father’s performances.

“I’m a huge fan!” she beams. “Though I haven’t watched the last episode of The Newsroom because he dies in it. I was on the red carpet for the premiere of Inherent Vice, and someone told me in an interview. It was so upsetting – they just said ‘Your Dad died... in the show!’ It was too long a pause!”

The actress reveals that watching her father be injured onscreen has proven to be emotionally stressful in the past.

“He was in this beautiful film, Anesthesia, by Tim Blake Nelson,” she says, “and he gets mugged in the film. And I have genuine PTSD from that, it was very convincing. The scene was shot and acted incredibly well so it was very upsetting.”

Right before our interview concludes, Waterston gets a phone call from her father, who is picking her up.

“Hi Dad!” she says chirpily. “This journalist just asked if you ever gave me any advice going into this business.”

She listens intently to the voice on the other end, before bursting out laughing.

“He says,‘Say nothing and leave that interview immediately.’”

Wise words.