Katherine Waterston

Katherine Waterston was born in London to the actor Sam Waterston and the model Lynn Louisa Woodruff, trained at NYU's Tisch School of the Arts, and turned up in two 2007 films, Michael Clayton and The Babysitters, in parts small enough that nobody was looking. She spent the next seven years in supporting roles for directors with taste, among them Robot & Frank, Being Flynn and The Disappearance of Eleanor Rigby, before Paul Thomas Anderson cast her as Shasta Fay Hepworth in Inherent Vice and the industry noticed all at once.

What she does is opacity. Most actors work to be legible; Waterston plays women whose interior life is clearly running but deliberately withheld, which makes her lethal opposite performers who over explain. Shasta is the purest version, a woman narrating her own story in a register that never confirms whether she is lying. Chrisann Brennan in Steve Jobs is the same skill turned toward injury rather than mystery, holding ground in scenes built for somebody else to win.

The franchises have used her less well. She played Tina Goldstein across three Fantastic Beasts films and the closest thing Alien: Covenant has to a hero, and both roles were written as audience surrogates, which is the one thing her particular gift cannot do much with. The smaller work stayed better throughout, and the recent choices, including The World to Come and The End We Start From, suggest she has drawn the same conclusion.