For Waterston, there’s magic in the air
LOS ANGELES — Katherine Waterston returns to screenwriter J.K. Rowling’s “Fantastic Beasts: The Crimes of Grindelwald” as Tina Goldstein.
Tina is an Auror, able to pursue and apprehend Dark Wizards. It’s already been revealed that she and Eddie Redmayne’s Newt Scamander are destined to be together, a situation Waterston, 38, finds delightful.
“We know Newt and Tina end up together. It’s so much fun but,” she pointed out, “the audience has this huge advantage over the characters.
“When we think this relationship is in trouble, we don’t think, ‘We’re playing these parts. I think it’s probably going to work out.’
“So when things go wrong, it gets intense. And it was so much fun to fight with (Eddie). So much fun to get really annoyed because of course it’s that thing when someone gets under your skin or you’re really frustrated, it’s typically some indication that you’re drawn to them in a really powerful way.
“So it was fun to resist the romance. To give the audience that pleasure of, ‘These two idiots! They don’t know what we know. They don’t know what’s going on.’ ”
Redmayne interjected: “We don’t know until we read the script what the story is going to be.”
But they know how to embellish. “We recklessly create new tasks for the CGI department,” she said with a laugh, referring to Tina’s costume change accomplished with a wave of her wand that wasn’t in the script.
“And the CGI department was, ‘OK! That’s going to take us a month.’
“But they let us do that stuff. It is really, really fun to be part of it in that way.”
The climax in “Grindelwald” is a stirring speech by Johnny Depp’s Hitleresque Dark Wizard Gellert Grindelwald.
Hearing that the first time, “I was just thrilled to see Johnny exploring the issues which are so much the issues of our time and also of the period when our film is set,” Waterston said.
“We know where that led us in the 20th century and to consider the possibility that we could be hurtling there again is chilling. Put an actor into it — it shows us how this happens.
“It’s not simply by being terrifying but being seductive, with logical arguments encouraging people to take sides to vilify the other.
“You see it takes a cunning person to manipulate people that way. Johnny really understood that.”