The Interior World of Jodie Foster: ‘You Give a Lot as an Actor’

A role in Martin Scorsese’s Alice Doesn’t Live Here Anymore (1974) as a streetwise, shoplifting tween may have led the director to cast her as Iris, the child sex worker in Taxi Driver. Before she could take the role, though, she had to pass a four-hour interview with a psychologist to prove she was “sane enough,” she says.

Good thing she’d already learned the kind of compartmentalizing “survival skills” and boundaries required to navigate such experiences, she says.

“I’m grateful that my mom loved me and wanted to protect my psyche,” she says. “She taught me how to be careful with what I gave out. You give a lot as an actor. I gave my whole life. I mean, from the time I was 3 years old, I’ve given my entire life, everything that I had, I gave. If I wanted to survive, there were areas that people just weren’t going to have.”

Foster’s connection to France and the French language also began early, offering her a different lens to see and understand herself in the world. At 9, she entered the Lycée Français de Los Angeles, where she grew up speaking French daily. She has spoken French on camera before, but A Private Life is the first time the language carries most of her performance.

(From Left) Jodie Foster and Daniel Auteuil in 'A Private Life' ('Vie Privée').

George Lechaptois

“That was a huge challenge,” she admits. “It took at least a month of me just going to France and not talking to anybody in English and diving in.”

Which brings her to a disclosure that is both baffling and a little funny, even to her.

“I’m a different person when I speak French,” she says. “My voice is higher. I’m not as confident. I feel like I’m going to make a mistake at any moment, so it makes me worried, anxious. I don’t feel like the grounded person that I am when I speak English, and there’s something interesting about that because it’s so different from who I am in America.”

Married to photographer-filmmaker Alexandra Hedison since 2014 and mother to sons Charlie, 27, a scientist, and Kit, 24, an actor, Foster keeps an apartment in France but mostly lives in Los Angeles, where she prefers a life of quiet routine and order.

“Every night before I go to bed,” she says, “I put out my clothes for the next day. I’ve done that every single day of my life — even if it’s just sweats for the gym. I don’t like to waste time. I want to be economical.”

Another form of compartmentalizing, no doubt. But despite all her self-awareness, it’s only now, in her 60s, that she feels a new clarity — hard won after a turbulent decade.

“My 50s were hard,” she says. “I felt like a failure. I kept thinking I was supposed to do something meaningful and hadn’t done it. I felt like I couldn’t live up to my own potential — like I couldn’t compete with my younger self.”

But her work told another story.

As the director for early episodes of House of Cards and Orange Is the New Black, she helped define prestige streaming TV. Returning to the screen in The Mauritanian (2021), Foster won a Golden Globe for her performance as real-life defense attorney Nancy Hollander fighting to free a Guantánamo detainee.

And then, “I turned 60,” says Foster, “and it was like a light bulb went off in my head. Everything changed. I was like, ‘Yeah, I don’t care. I’m no longer tortured by any of this. I don’t know why I seemed to care so much.’ ”

(From left) Annette Bening as Diana Nyad, and Jodie Foster in Nyad, 2023.

Kimberley French/Netflix/Everett Collection

Her 60s have already brought Nyad, True Detective: Night Country and a fresh wave of award recognition.

Films may not heal all wounds, but Foster still believes in what they can do.

“Movies can help people ask questions,” she says, “and help people put themselves in other people’s shoes. Hopefully, in a moment where cruelty is the new currency, they promote empathy.”

She pauses, thinks for a beat, then adds:

“I think movies can make us better people. That’s really been my objective all along — how can I be a better person?”