Jodie Foster has said she doesn’t understand why young actors accept roles in “bad” movies.
The 62-year-old actor and former child star, who began working as a model when she was just three years old and was nominated for her first Oscar for Taxi Driver aged 14, has said that she cannot relate to young actors who “just want to act” and “don’t care if the movie’s bad”.
Speaking to Variety at Cannes film festival, Foster said she still enjoyed acting but added that she was picky about her projects and that she wasn’t interested in “acting for the sake of acting”.
“I see a lot of young actors, and I’m not saying I’m jealous, but I don’t understand how they just want to act. They don’t care if the movie’s bad. They don’t care if the dialogue is bad. They don’t care if they’re a grape in a Fruit of the Loom ad,” she said.
“If I never acted again, I wouldn’t really care. I really like to be a vessel for story or cinema. If I could do something else, if I was a writer or a painter or sculptor, that would be good too. But this is the only skill I have.”
She added that in her own career, she had “worked so much” by the time she turned 18 that she needed to take a different approach when choosing her projects.
Foster said that she signed on to her latest film, Vie Privée, a French thriller in which she plays a therapist who becomes convinced that her patient’s suicide is a murder, because it felt like the “right piece of material”.
“It has to really speak to me,” she said. “I’m interested in narrative. I’m all about developing a character who propels the story. This ticked all the boxes.”
Foster has previously spoken about how she is at odds with the younger generation when she stated that she’d found Gen Z – the generation born roughly between 1997 and 2012 – to be “really annoying, especially in the workplace”.
“They’re like, ‘Nah, I’m not feeling it today, I’m gonna come in at 10.30am.’ Or in emails, I’ll tell them, ‘This is all grammatically incorrect, did you not check your spelling?’ And they’re like, ‘Why would I do that, isn’t that kind of limiting?’” she told The Guardian in an interview last year.
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Foster explained that she’d reached out to connect with younger actors such as non-binary performer Bella Ramsey in recent years “because it was hard growing up”.
“They need to learn how to relax, how to not think about it so much, how to come up with something that’s theirs,” Foster said. “I can help them find that, which is so much more fun than being, with all the pressure behind it, the protagonist of the story.”
Alongside Taxi Driver, Foster rose to fame starring in Martin Scorsese’s 1974 comedy-drama Alice Doesn’t Live Here Anymore, playing Tallulah in the 1976 film Bugsy Malone and Annabel in 1976’s Freaky Friday.
She won her first Academy Award for Best Actress for her role as waitress Sarah Tobias in 1988’s The Accused and her second for playing FBI agent Clarice Starling in the 1991 film The Silence of the Lambs. She recently received an Oscar nomination for her work as a swimming coach in 2023’s Nyad and an Emmy for her performance in the HBO series True Detective: Night Country.
