.png){kind=logo}
Jodie Foster still thinks about Clarice Starling.
After winning her second Oscar for playing the dogged FBI agent who must rely on Anthony Hopkins’ insinuating cannibal in 1991’s “The Silence of the Lambs,” she ceded the role of Clarice to Julianne Moore for “Hannibal,” the 2001 sequel.
“It was easy,” Foster recalls of the decision not to join the film. “We waited years for that novel that Thomas Harris said he was writing, that he probably wrote in eight weeks.” Director Jonathan Demme had wanted to base any future films in the Hannibal Lecter universe on Harris’ work. But the book was substantially more grotesque than “The Silence of the Lambs,” and took both Hannibal and Clarice in implausible directions. (Hannibal feeds Clarice a victim’s brain, and the novel ends with the pair as romantic partners.)
“We waited,” she goes on. “Jonathan said no, because he did not appreciate the book. And luckily, I was doing something else, so I was able to say, ‘Ah! No. I’m shooting something else.’” She grins.
But she can’t help pondering Clarice today, openly musing about directions the character might go. “Let’s just say she stayed in the FBI,” Foster says. “She’s spent 40 years in the FBI: What has she seen, and what has that culture taught her, and what is the culture now?”
Foster and Starling are inextricably linked in the cultural imagination. The actress wasn’t the first choice for the role — Michelle Pfeiffer, who’d just worked with Demme on “Married to the Mob,” turned it down due to discomfort with the subject matter. But the character’s clenched jaw and coiled intellect have, until Foster’s late-period revival, shown us what Foster has seemed to do best. And, like Clarice in the FBI, Foster has had to fight to keep the environment in which she grew up from changing her into someone she didn’t recognize. Famous since childhood, Foster has struggled mightily to resist giving some essential part of herself away, to the industry, to fans or to the press.
She wonders whether her best-known character would have done the same — stayed essentially herself despite the pressure to transform: “Would she have adopted the FBI, judgy, tough on crime, or would she have grown out of it and become something else? Or would she be the person who changed the FBI and said, We’re not going to do it the old way?
“Who would Clarice be?” Foster asks. “At 63, who would she be?”
It’s an intriguing question. At 63 herself, Foster intrigues as well. Speaking to her, as I do in November in Los Angeles, is a disarming experience. You’re talking to a star who had two best actress Oscars before 30 (the first was for 1988’s “The Accused”) — but she also trundles into the interview with a giant paper bag from Joan’s on Third and a similarly massive desk calendar tucked under her arm, prompt and utilitarian and refusing to force anyone else to carry her detritus.
Later, when we part ways, Foster will ask me to mention that she was severely overcaffeinated during our conversation, and moments of fitful hops between subjects begin to make sense. Take her description of her decision to quit acting after turning 50 — prompted by her peremptory tone when speaking to an unnamed person on set.
“I asked someone for a cappuccino?” she recalls with a tone of barely restrained horror. “I did what? I thought I knew what I was talking about and ranted on for 45 minutes? I didn’t send that person a condolence letter when their mom died? I wasn’t at their wedding? I disappeared for four months and expected everybody to be my friend when I came back?”
I know what she means, sort of. Foster, who had been truly famous since her breakout role at age 12 in 1976’s “Taxi Driver,” feared she was becoming a creature of Hollywood — in other words, an asshole. But there are, of course, people on set whose job is to make sure Ms. Foster has an espresso drink made to her specifications. And is that really such an offense, on par with skipping a wedding? In the flow of Foster’s charisma, though, it’s hard to get a foothold — caught up in the story, I find myself horrified at her temerity, and relieved she’s not asking anyone for cappuccinos anymore.
Audiences felt the same way — moved, if befuddled — during her 2013 Golden Globes speech. After Robert Downey Jr. presented her with the Cecil B. DeMille Award, she delivered an address that many took as Foster coming out of the closet. When I bring it up, she blurts out, “They were confused!” (Thinking back on our interview, perhaps there were signs of this self-confessed overcaffeination.)
Well, can one blame them for not quite getting Foster’s meaning? In her speech, Foster thanked her “heroic co-parent” and “ex-partner in love but righteous soul sister in life,” Cydney Bernard. (Foster and Bernard’s two sons, Charlie and Kit, are now in their 20s.) This acknowledgment, after decades of silence on the subject of her sexuality, was seismic.
But she doesn’t see it that way. Foster had written a speech that was artful and elusive. Her mention of Bernard was in a weaving narrative of her growing up in the industry, her fears that the pressure for her to talk about her personal life were tied to a larger cultural shift and her increasing disaffection with Hollywood. There was a lot going on. Even reflecting on it, she refuses to be pinned down.
“It was really important that it be so literary,” Foster says, “because I knew that it would be chopped up, misinterpreted.” She wanted it as a document, so that “20 years from now, my kids will go back” and see where she was at 50. In the midst of coming-out-or-not-coming-out, Foster also spoke at length about privacy — how it was vanishing, and how much she’d miss it when it was gone. An audience of her peers, many of whom had long since begun sharing their lives on Instagram, sat rapt in the Beverly Hilton ballroom that January night.
Perhaps more consequentially, though, Foster used the speech to announce that she was thinking about walking away from large-scale moviemaking. (Few people understood this part either.) “From now on,” she declared, “I may be holding a different talking stick. And maybe it won’t be as sparkly. Maybe it won’t open on 3,000 screens.”
And then she followed through. Foster picked up TV directing gigs on “Orange Is the New Black,” “House of Cards” and “Black Mirror,” and helmed the 2016 movie “Money Monster.” She acted in only two movies in 10 years, both little seen: “Hotel Artemis” and “The Mauritanian.” She returned to major roles in 2023’s “Nyad” and on HBO’s “True Detective: Night Country” early the next year. She received an Oscar nomination and an Emmy in 2024. Foster was an anonymous TV director no more: She was back on the promotional and campaign trail.
In Foster’s time away from the limelight, Hollywood missed her particular actorly touch with flintiness or with a hard edge — showing the delicacy that lies under a defense mechanism. Audiences may have also missed her remove: The A-listers of her generation have embraced social media even more assiduously than millennials or Gen Z. Watching Foster’s peers do the “That’s Not My Name” challenge on Instagram, one yearned for a star who knew how to keep something in reserve — even if, at times, Foster’s longing to keep herself in hiding could frustrate fans and journalists alike.
Now, in “A Private Life,” which opens Jan. 16 after a Cannes premiere last year and an awards qualifying run, she plays Lilian Steiner, an American psychiatrist living in Paris who is having a breakdown over the death of a patient and sets out to solve what really happened, if she can hold it together long enough to crack the case. It’s a fittingly titled film for a star who’s determined to do Hollywood her own way — to overcaffeinate, but on cappuccino she procures for herself.
“I think I’m doing the best work of my life,” she says. “And the dirty little secret is that I’ve never worked less in terms of my energy output. I just do what I think, and then I drink a coffee.”
No kidding.
It was Clarice who showed Foster the value of doing things one’s own way. At the start of “The Silence of the Lambs,” she’s an apple polisher, determined to rise through the FBI ranks; Foster could relate. “I’m a good girl, not a rebel,” she says. “I got good grades. Being raised in the 1960s — you know your place, and then you challenge within the system and make changes within the system.” But to stop a serial killer, Clarice must confront her own inner darkness.
“She has to become the tragic prince who starts out as a good boy and learns that his worst failing is actually his greatest strength,” Foster says. “This is usually a male character. Why should that only be reserved for men?” (It’s apt, perhaps, that an actress who got rejected from an audition to play Cindy on “The Brady Bunch” for not being girly enough got to play the male archetype. “You knew Peppermint Patty, but other than that, you never saw a tomboy,” she says.)
“The moment she becomes pure instinct instead of Yes, sir; no, ma’am,” Foster says, “that was life-changing.”
Foster had refused to back down in her pursuit of the role, despite the specter of peak-of-fame Pfeiffer; she’d been the “consolation prize,” as she puts it, for “The Accused” too. And her mother, who’d managed Foster’s career since childhood, didn’t want her to take the part of Clarice even if she got it.
“She said, ‘Why do you want to be second fiddle? He’s got a great part. Your part … there’s nothing showy or flashy.”
Foster kept pushing, auditioning in a style the producers wanted even as she knew she’d play the part a different way. Her mother was unconvinced. Foster says, “I was trusting a creative instinct, and she was giving me the Hollywood wisdom. I want to challenge Hollywood wisdom. She was guided by fear and convention. It was really clarifying, at 27, to say, I am not going to listen to your fears.”
There was tension between Foster and her mother over the decision. This was a somewhat novel situation: Evelyn “Brandy” Foster, a single mother who also managed the career of her son, Buddy Foster, had always told Jodie she could accomplish anything. “She was infuriating in some ways — and then, ‘You’re a Picasso! You want to sing? Be a singer! Go, go, go. You can do it all.’ And then handicapping in other ways, which is part of the female problem.” After “The Silence of the Lambs” became a smash, Brandy worried that Jodie thought less of her over the conversation. “I was like, Mom, no, this is a dialogue. And if you hadn’t pushed back, maybe I wouldn’t have cared so much.”
Foster’s mother looms large in stories about her early career. When she started “Taxi Driver,” for instance, Foster wasn’t yet taking acting seriously. Her mother had predicted that her career would be over when she was 16, so this was all for fun. Brandy died at 90 in 2019; she had pushed Jodie toward Scorsese because mother and daughter had seen “Mean Streets” together five times.
Granted, Foster had played a small role in Scorsese’s “Alice Doesn’t Live Here Anymore,” but it had been nothing like this. “Robert De Niro kind of took me under his wing,” she recalls. The actor began improvising with her: “I suddenly realized: The dissatisfaction that I had with acting, thinking this is not a job that’s going to satisfy me for life, was because I didn’t bring enough to the table. I hadn’t done the work of creating a character. There was this infinite amount of challenge and love and connection that I just didn’t know.” She rushed back from improvising with De Niro to her Manhattan hotel to tell her mother what she’d learned.
Impressing her mom, for Foster, was paramount. “I loved her, and she was an amazing manager and a brilliant woman,” she says. “But I was a vicarious instrument. She was a pre-feminist woman who would have loved to have been taken seriously, to have been doing important things that were not about her looks.” The concept of a “momager” comes with some heavy baggage, but while Brandy was pushing Jodie forward, she was at least pushing her toward art. “The vicarious path that she wanted for me was really amazing,” she says. “She was like, you will be respected. You will not do stuff for money. You will not be objectified.”
“She wanted so much more than her lot in life,” Foster says now. That included a desire to travel. Foster recalls her asking: “What if you go to France and become a French actor, and then you can work with the Cahiers du Cinéma people?”
With “A Private Life,” Foster’s fulfilling that desire a bit later on. While it’s not the first time she’s acted in French, it’s the most substantial role in the language that she’s ever played, and one with a director who’s working totally outside the Hollywood system. Parisian director Rebecca Zlotowski had not expected Foster to sign on, even though she’d written the role for her.
“I’m still figuring out why she said yes,” says Zlotowski. “One person told me French directors allowed her to drink, smoke, curse. So it’s a kind of safe space where you can escape from your celebrity.”
Lilian does do all that — smoke, drink, curse and escape whatever image comes pre-attached to the woman playing her. In the past, the archetypal Jodie Foster role has been one with a furrowed brow and intense, plainspoken directness. As a stubborn but loving swim coach in “Nyad,” a troubled Alaskan cop in “True Detective” and now a freewheeling shrink in disarray in “A Private Life,” Foster has been messily human, strikingly relaxed.
“She’s not only a legendary actor,” Zlotowski says, “but she’s very picky with her roles. Every role creates a sub-sentence. At the end of her filmography, a secret sentence will be delivered.”
Subverting the movie-star image is one thing, but the secret sentence was a little more personal for Foster too. Late in her life, Brandy Foster, the mother who’d encouraged Jodie to learn French so that she could act with French New Wave directors, moved to Paris.
“Walking those streets that my mom took me down,” she says, “I was reliving this new identity my mom got. She lived in Paris for 10 years without speaking a word of French. And she was the person there that she always wanted to be.” It was a fantasy life — but it was, for a woman whose life had been lived primarily through her precocious daughter, finally her own. “I feel like,” Foster says, “I was channeling my mom.”
Brandy was suffering from dementia when her daughter delivered her Golden Globes speech announcing her step back from the spotlight. For Foster, who was realizing she needed a break, it was a precarious moment.
“There were a lot of years where I just wasn’t a good friend, and I didn’t show up for people, and I was so busy protecting myself,” she says. As she approached and then turned 50, Foster wasn’t sure what the career she’d fought so hard for was even supposed to look like. “That awkward moment between 50 and 60 is just crazy — maybe it is for men too,” she says. “You’re like, wait, who am I? And am I supposed to be like I used to be, except kind of worse?”
Something shifted in her time away. While in 2013 the mere fact of her mentioning Bernard kicked off a news cycle, at the socially distanced 2021 Globes ceremony, Foster picked up best supporting actress for the film “The Mauritanian,” and accepted the prize from her couch, seated next to her wife, photographer Alexandra Hedison, and their dog. There are now certain things that Foster is willing to let go. Other issues broached in her DeMille speech still remain fresh. She’s angry to see that what she most feared about the loss of privacy came true. “Did we sign a document that said you can scan my face everywhere in the world and then put me on someone else’s body?” she asks, her voice rising. “Did we say yes to fucking trolls invading our life and bullying our children?”
Foster’s approach to her public life had been to put it all on the screen. “I hope you actually read it, as opposed to just seeing it,” she says of her speech late in our conversation. When I do, I’m struck by a line about her childhood. “I have given everything up there,” she says, referring to the movie screen, “from the time that I was 3 years old. That’s reality show enough, don’t you think?”
She insists that her refusal to perform celebrity was a necessary choice: “I had to do it my way. You like me as someone who has my dignity. You can’t strip it away from me and then have me remain the me that I am.” This extends to her longtime silence around her home life, tentatively broken in 2013. For years, members of the queer community criticized Foster for not being out publicly, particularly during the AIDS crisis as activist groups fought for visibility. The plot of “The Silence of the Lambs” — with its trans-coded serial killer — exacerbated their frustration.
“Thank God there were the wonderful pioneers that were out there changing the world,” Foster says. “That’s true of the Civil Rights Movement, and yet you have Denzel Washington, who just made movies. Are we mad at him? Does everyone have to?”
But as her bristling at the question even now makes clear, there’s dignity, and then there are … trust issues. Foster compares her mindset to the plot of the 2011 film “The Beaver,” which she directed and in which she appears. In the film, Mel Gibson uses a beaver hand puppet to communicate emotions that he as an adult man cannot voice. “The whole story of ‘The Beaver,’ she says, “is, we put on the survival tools that helped us, when we were 5 and 6, survive and not kill ourselves. And then, as you get older, you’re like, These survival tools are killing me. The 40s to 60s is the painful process of going, This is not helping me. How can I stop this? How can I stop distrusting everyone?”
Foster always, at least, trusted her creative collaborators. And she fears that the elements of influencer culture that she despises will chip that away. What she calls “the selfie generation,” is, in her view, too focused on bolstering its image at the expense of the art: “They’re so self-conscious. It’s going to take an ice pick to get them to be actors.” Kristen Stewart, Foster’s on-screen daughter in “Panic Room,” is an exception: “She is brave. She had parents that were brave. And she was given the keys to bravery. I didn’t know that I would ever have them. I thought my role was to make other people happy, and to eat shit. I was the right person to put in rubber boots at 20 degrees below zero, because I was never going to complain.”
As a child, Foster didn’t complain because of an esprit de corps. It wouldn’t help the project to whine. “You can commend her for being such an amazing team player,” “Panic Room” directer David Fincher tells me, “but my feeling at the time was that she’d been this way since she was in middle school. She’s been No. 1 on the call sheet and been No. 11 on the call sheet. She knows it all, and she remembers it all.”
Now, though, she’s just over the drama. On one notably cold rubber-boot-clad set — that of “True Detective: Night Country,” which shot nights in the Iceland winter — Foster was trying to engage a young co-star in conversation. The actor, Finn Bennett, in his mid-20s, was thrown off during an outdoor night shoot in subzero temperatures: There was an issue with the lighting. Meanwhile, Foster was asking him if he’d ever seen a favorite movie of hers, the 2004 political satire “Team America: World Police.”
“I was like, ‘Dude, it’s fine. It does not matter.’ If you give me the wrong word, I’m going to listen and respond with your wrong word. It’s the worrying that kills everyone — people spend 45 years of their lives trying to distract from worrying.”
Foster can feel like a figure out of step with the expectations and interests of contemporary stardom: Many of her peers, for instance, go on “Watch What Happens Live” to tell Andy Cohen who’s their favorite Real Housewife. But during our cover shoot, when our video producer mentions to Foster that she will shortly be covering BravoCon, a gathering of reality-TV celebrities, Foster suggests that she take the opportunity to interview Foster’s Yale mentor Henry Louis Gates Jr. there. His PBS genealogy series “Finding Your Roots” is a reality show, after all. Back in 2013, she’d mentioned the “Toddlers & Tiaras” star Honey Boo Boo in her Golden Globes speech, as an example of culture’s coarsening; in our conversation, she brings her up again, having perhaps learned no new reality-star names in the intervening 13 years.
She’s interested in mentorship, though, and was as early as “Panic Room”: Fincher couldn’t physically fit into the space where Foster’s and Stewart’s characters were hiding, and Foster would guide Stewart toward giving the performance the famously exacting director wanted. “She was so good at being able to take stuff that I was used to talking to adults about,” Fincher says, “and making it bite-sized for a child.” Now, though, Foster’s not sure what to say: “What do I have to teach a new generation?” she asks. “Except that meditation is good, and knowing how to relax and drink coffee and listen to music and be able to have a conversation about other things.”
Foster’s later-career resurgence has been defined by a step away from worrying. And notably, it’s been centered on two films and a TV show either directed or co-directed by women. After the underperformance of the George Clooney-led thriller “Money Monster,” Foster swore off studio filmmaking. “It was amazing having all the money I needed,” she says, “but the mandate of a mainstream movie opening up, the idea of quadrants, the ‘Let’s sell the movie for something it isn’t so that more people come and then they’ll be disappointed’ … Yeah, I don’t ever want to do that again.”
Working with male directors almost exclusively earlier in her career, she says, “my relationship is kind of simple. You tell me; you want it; I do it.” She notes with a gleam in her eye that while Fincher often requires many takes of his actors, that was not the case on “Panic Room,” where she calibrated her performance precisely to his specifications: “I know what you need here,” she recalls saying. “Let me give it to you.”
Working with women is both “really amazing” and novel for Foster. “It is much more complex,” she says. “I get more irritated. There’s a thing we have to figure out. With women, these boundaries are fuzzy.” Foster is now, for example, close friends with Issa López, her “True Detective” showrunner, but she didn’t want a friendship during the shoot; it would have distracted from the work.
And boarding “A Private Life,” Foster wanted to be clear that it would not be what she calls a “behavior movie” — more about small social incidents than a defined character arc. “She cannot do a totally unresolved part,” Zlotowski says. “This is something that she may like in European films, but that she would never delve into.”
“I look for: How can I serve a story?” Foster says. “What can I bring to the table to get from A to D?” In moments when she and Zlotowski disagreed, Foster says, she thought to herself, “OK, that’s fine. It’s your movie. I’m just going to hang on to mine.”
Zlotowski says the arc of Foster’s “A Private Life” character goes “from a very bad therapist in the beginning to a slightly better therapist at the end.” There’s the smallest of breakthroughs. That’s enough for Foster, who doesn’t need the character to be a Clarice-style good guy in order to find her compelling: “I’m not interested in repeating the same things I did that are very iconic central figures. I did that, and it’s great. It’s so much fun to be older and have a more nuanced route to things. I don’t have to hold the movie’s moral weight on my shoulders.”
She returns to this just as I’m about to turn off my recorder, so that she can tell me she’s overcaffeinated and offer me a ride back to my hotel. (It turns out I’m staying in the other direction — she’d have to drive west, and now that they’re not working together, she has plans to get dinner tonight at République with López.) I mention that the roles she’s taken since returning sit off the center of the frame, far from the kind of moral exemplar Clarice represented.
She agrees. “When I was young,” she says. “I wanted to be the winner. I wanted to be the hero that gets the gold in the end and learns the big lesson, and everything’s about them. Now, I want to be the person that loses.”
After all, you can lose things and the story isn’t over. Foster lost her interest in acting, and found it again; she lost whatever it was that kept her from ordering coffee like an asshole, and then she came back to herself. “The movies I make,” she says, “will be about this big life that I have, not about references from 365 days a year in a reality show.” She tells me a story about how her family is renting an Airbnb to spend Christmas together, and the boys are worried they won’t get enough time with her, and she’s as animated by this prosaic story as she is recalling her audition for Jonathan Demme.
“They call me with these heartfelt difficulties or insecurities,” she goes on. “I got to be with my mom for the 15 years of dementia, and when she died, I was there. That’s the stuff that I’m really proud of.” She exhales. “Oh, life!” This last word she says as if she’s just rediscovering a concept from her childhood, one that she’d left in a pocket somewhere and is delighted to find once more. “I was present for life.”
English (US) ·