For a long time, the actor was the most visible lesbian in Hollywood (not that she really wanted to talk about it). Now the True Detective star feels liberated – and is helping the younger generation follow suit
It’s been about 58 years since Jodie Foster’s first acting role and there are things she probably wouldn’t stand on set. They probably wouldn’t tell you how to get into character. She won’t tolerate what she calls a “voodoo” staging, ie. I mean, it’s silly to make your body move. It will not respond to certain types of “alpha” interference from other people at the top of the business chain. (The only time Foster submits to authoritarian producers, he says, is when they’re “super “passive-aggressive British,” a guy he just can’t resist. )In the way she works and outside of interactions with the press, she is conscientious, in fact, with almost no functional anxiety or self-awareness. I tell or a character in the same way that I do the report of an e-book,” he says. “I like to make it pragmatic. “
We’re in a hotel suite in West Hollywood, where the 61-year-old is captivating and personable, with gel-styled hair, tiny-waisted black pants and an impeccable white blouse pulled up at the neck. She may simply be a matador, or someone in a high-end caterer, and the absolute familiarity of her face and mannerisms is astounding. The voice and smile, mocking laughter and intensity evoke decades of iconic roles, from Clarice Starling in The Silence of the Lambs and Sarah Tobias in The Accused, to her formative years roles in Taxi Driver and Bugsy Malone. Foster removes her mules to expose her red-painted nails and tucks her legs underneath her, an unstudied (or conscious) gesture. After five decades of fame, I think she understands as well as I do that “she sticks her legs under her” is the kind of stupid profiling that profilers like to use to invoke fake intimacy.
There’s some other aspect of Foster; one that is particularly less straightforward and, over the years, has made much of its canopy painful to read. angle to put the issue of their sexuality on the table. For a long time, Foster was the only visual gay woman in Hollywood, and in those days, her ability to speak publicly about her life is bogged down in anything that, to me, is very much like post-traumatic stress disorder.
Anyway, here we are, ostensibly to talk about True Detective: Night Country, the fourth season of the bro-y cult anthology directed by Matthew McConaughey and Woody Harrelson, and which, this season, after all, puts some women in stage. Foster plays Liz Danvers, police chief of Ennis, a small desert town in the extreme north of Alaska, where we join the story on the eve of permanent night: the two months of the year in which this component of the planet is present. darkness. It’s a crime drama, a buddy drama, a moving depiction of Native American lives, and, like other True Detectives, a supernatural story that doesn’t yet have much meaning but nonetheless offers a very charming adventure. Array Foster’s cop, “Alaska Karen,” as she puts it, is lonely and bitter, spitting lines like, “Stop where she is, Ennis cop. . . you moron. ” As far as roles go, it’s not too complicated for Foster, who enjoyed filming the six-parter in Iceland, but there’s a satisfying arc for her character that’s obviously her type of thing.
A more surprising feature of the series is contemplating what it must have been like for the relatively young cast and crew to work alongside Jodie Foster. Aside from Fiona Shaw, who plays a former school teacher living on the outskirts of town and with whom Foster had no scenes (they had dinner together, she says), the production is often made up of new, inexperienced actors. Kali Reis, who is brilliant as Evangeline Navarro, Danvers’ local partner, was until recently a professional boxer; Issa López, the director, is a successful Mexican who has made a handful of Spanish-language films, including the horror-fantasy film Los Tigres Aren’t Afraid, but this is his first major commission in the United States. United. Foster, for her part, has participated in fifty productions, has directed several films and television episodes and won two Academy Awards for most productive actress, for The Silence of the Lambs and The Accused. A singular quality in Foster, difficult to describe – a kind of shocking intensity, perhaps – as well as the volume and quality of her paintings bring her closer to icon status. What would it have been like for the young people who worked with her?
She probably wouldn’t settle for that, of course. “Well, I’m kind of funny. I mean, I don’t take anything seriously. I make jokes all the time. She pauses. ” And you know, I’m not an expert. “
It makes me laugh out loud. You are the definition of an expert. You’ve been doing this task since you were 3 years old!Imagine De Niro or Pacino saying something like that. Promote smiles. “Not really. I only know myself, I don’t really know anyone else, and even as a director, I’m curiously not an actor-director. Foster’s first film, the 1991 film Little Man Tate, in which she also starred, her directing career was followed through a handful of films and individual episodes of television shows such as Orange Is the New Black and Black Mirror. “I actually let the actors do their homework and just hope they gave me the casting. Bien. No I’m someone who can bring up a functionality in the two hundred plug. I cast and allow anything to happen on the screen, and if you do it fast enough, other people don’t think too much.
She has very particular requirements when it comes to being directed herself, and if there was any difficulty on True Detective – “Well, not difficult, but the little dance that has to be done” – it was with the director, López. “She has directed four movies, and I’ve been in so many films, and I think that part is sometimes daunting. But we bonded immediately and laughed through everything. I like it when directors tell me what they want and say things like faster, slower. I’m not interested in directors who are like” – she puts on a whispery, luvvie-ish voice – “‘Here, let me shake you!’ She might have to do that with other people, because they’re young or they’ve never acted before. And I would watch her do that with them and … ” Foster snorts. “You’d better not do that with me.”
This is the second consecutive project in which Foster has worked with much less experienced directors. On the recent Netflix movie Nyad, in which Foster plays Bonnie Stoll, the best friend and coach of marathon swimmer, Diana Nyad, she was working with an even less seasoned team: first-time feature directors Elizabeth Chai Vasarhelyi and Jimmy Chin, who had previously only worked in documentary film. I loved Nyad, partly because it was so funny and well written, partly because Annette Bening is brilliant in the title role, and partly because of Foster, who is more relaxed on screen than anything I’ve seen her in since she made Freaky Friday at the age of 13. It is nice, for once, to see her playing someone who isn’t slogging through a trauma or being launched alone into space.
In Nyad, she is loose-limbed, and full of easy humour and jokes – her performance has just been nominated for a Golden Globe. As far as I’m aware, it’s the first time Foster has played an out lesbian. (There’s a separate essay to be written about gay subtext in her depiction of Clarice Starling in Silence of the Lambs, which lesbians will give you chapter and verse on – the boots, the duffel coat, the way she shrinks and smirks in relation to the male characters, I could go on). The press around the film, particularly when hacks brought up the fact both lead characters were gay, was customarily awkward. It is worth pointing out here that it is harder for gay women than gay men in Hollywood, where there is no female equivalent of, say, showrunner Ryan Murphy (well, there is; but she’s so far back in the closet she’s practically in Narnia). I don’t blame Foster for withdrawing. Questions about her life aren’t overtly hostile or mocking these days, but there is often still a judgment behind them: from straight people, broadly, why are you still so bent out of shape by this; and from the gay press, why didn’t you do more back in the day?
I told Foster that I enjoyed Nyad and she cheerfully said, “Oh, thank you!I love both of them [Bonnie and Diana], so the main explanation for why I do it. I was introduced to them for barbecues and all that. “.
There is a narrative of trauma in Nyad that is subtly addressed. As a teenage swimming champion, Nyad was assaulted by her coach. “Obviously, those are young filmmakers and there were a lot of them; We all express our thoughts, after making films about victims of sexual violence. They fired far more than they injected. Instead, the film focuses on Nyad’s record-breaking swim from Cuba to Florida, made at the age of 64 and facing immense physical risks. “The vital thing for Diana, me and Annette said: we can’t think he’s going to be able to swim because of the assault. My happiest moment in the movie is when Bonnie says in an aside, “Oh, I read in the paper that he [the coach] died. “And Diana said, “He made no impression on me; It’s just that sometimes, every once in a while, I feel like I’m 14 years behind and I’m struggling with that kind of thing.
Personally, I liked the spooky scenes at the beginning of the film, when Foster and Bening relax in their Los Angeles home, playing table tennis and Scrabble. “yes, I love those scenes. To succeed on Bonnie’s stomach, Foster trained like an athlete for six months; She walks through the film in shorts and a vest, brandishing her paperweight and whistle as the world’s most talented PE teacher. She’s been portrayed as a nerd, but in light of the evidence, she’s rarely very much of an athlete. Foster laughed out loud. I’ve been waiting to be objectified my whole life, so I’m very pleased that other people were born to communicate about parts of my body. “
Foster recently spoke of midlife as an awkward transitional decade in which she had to figure out, in the absence of many role models, how to be a woman from a certain age in Hollywood. He discovered an answer in friendships of all ages. “I have a friend I adore, who is 80 years old. She’s a school teacher, she lived in a commune in the early 70s, she’s an ordinary person. I can see what’s ahead, what’s possible. Despite all her accomplishments, what she continues to say, and I think it’s true, is that the most important thing is to help other women’s communities.
What do you think young people in your domain want to hear?”You have to inform them so that they relax, so that they don’t think about it too much, so that they invent something of their own. I can help them discover that, which is more fun than being, with all the tension, the protagonist of the story.
I mention to Foster that I recently saw a photo of her with young British actress Bella Ramsey, the non-binary star of HBO’s zombie hit The Last of Us who, in her 20s, is on the verge of megastardom. Last month, Ramsey brought Foster to Elle magazine’s Women in Hollywood celebration, a couple Foster says she wondered. “I went up to Bella, because we’d never met, and I said, ‘I need you to introduce me to this,’ which is a glorious occasion. for actors and other people in movies, but it’s also a matter of fashion. Which means it’s all about who represents us. [The organizers] are very proud of themselves because they have all ethnicities, and I say, yes, still. All participants wear heels and eyelashes. There are other ways to be a woman and it’s important for others to see that. And Bella, who gave the most productive speech, wore the most productive suit, gorgeously cut, parted in the middle, and without makeup.
As a mentoring relationship, it’s part of a pattern, says Foster. “I do a lot of reaching out to young actresses. I’m compelled. Because it was hard growing up.” When she looks at Ramsey, who told British Vogue earlier this year that “I’m not 100% straight”, does she feel a pang of sympathy for her younger self? “Yes.” It was so bleak. “But I had my mom, you know.” Foster’s late mother, Brandy, was a force of nature in the entertainment industry, who raised her four children in LA and stewarded Foster, from the age of three, when she first put her up for commercials, to stardom.
Could I have worn a suit and parted down the middle seriously without makeup when I was a young actress?”No,” he said. Because we weren’t free. Because we didn’t have freedom. And I hope that’s the vector of authenticity that happens: the choice of true freedom. We had other things that were good. And I would say: I did the most productive thing I could for my generation. I’m very busy figuring out where I belonged and where I wanted to be in terms of feminism. But my purpose is not broad enough. I lived in an incredibly segregated world.
I mention everything you said the other day about the concern that dictates most of our elections. “It can. It protects you. But it’s also a distortion, is it rarely very good?Beyond a safe point?” Well, it’s a survival skill, but the one that will end up killing you. I deserve to upload that, despite all his support for Gen Z, Foster doesn’t hesitate to chafe through them. “They’re annoying, especially in the workplace. They say, “No, I’m not sorry today, I’ll be there at 10:30 a. m. Or, for example, in emails I tell them that everything is grammatically incorrect, haven’t you checked your spelling?And they say, “Why do I deserve to do that? That’s rarely the case. “Very, very a little limiting?”
Foster has two sons, Kit and Charles, both in their 20s, with his ex-partner, film producer Cydney Bernard. She and Bernard separated in 2008 and she has been married to photographer Alexandra Hedison for 10 years. One funny effect of raising her sons, Foster says, was her early confusion about how exactly to be a man. “My two don’t like sports,” she said. “They like watching videos and staying home, and they like their friends. They are super feminists. And there was a time with my oldest son, when he was in the best school, where, because he was raised by two women (three women), it was like he was looking to find out what he was. ‘be a child. And he watched TV and concluded, oh, I just want to be a jerk. I understand! I want to be shitty to women and act like he’s an idiot. And I said no! That’s not being a boy! This is what our culture has been promoting to you all this time. The phase lasted six months, she said. Did you let him play? “Yes and no. I thought you couldn’t possibly communicate with me that way. ” Foster bursts out laughing.
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Meanwhile, her wife has just had a short documentary called Alok – a portrait of the non-binary author, poet and comedian Alok Vaid-Menon – accepted by Sundance, which Foster says makes her very proud. Although Foster served as the short film’s executive producer, they are not overly involved in each other’s work. “We like doing our work independently, although there are things that I do better, she recognises.” Sounds ominous. Like what? “I’m a really good letter writer. And she’s extraordinarily visual. Great photographer.”
Getting to this place of seeming security and happiness with Hedison has been a struggle for Foster. Even minor celebrity is corrosive, and Foster’s fame is ridiculous. It has taken years of work, she says, not to be ruined by it. “There is a meta-weirdness to having been a public figure from the time you were young, right? Especially if you have stayed being an actor.” It wasn’t until she took time off mid-career that she realised just how odd her life was. Suddenly, “I had lots of time where I wasn’t the most important person in the room. Or not everybody was listening to the stupid shit I was ranting about. Being a public figure, your universe is altered and you just don’t know anything else. And you don’t know that you’re a blowhard, and that you’re not a good friend, and that you never show up.”
Because other people make you happy?” Because other people make you happy. So there are classes that are difficult to learn. There’s something Hugh Grant said, and I guess he’s right: that fame at a young age is like being injected with steroids. And live with those big muscles for the rest of your life, and then one day, you make a resolution to go steroid-free. And you don’t recognize yourself and you have no idea who you are. And we want to rebuild an entire world’s identity It can be difficult, and it’s anything I had to report late.
During the years Foster was with Bernard, she never took her to the Oscars or other public events, and never publicly owned to their relationship – although she did, later, pay tribute to her in her 2013 Golden Globes speech, when after thanking Bernard she said, “I’m so proud of our modern family.” What’s the reckoning, I ask. Is it someone telling you they can’t live with you any more because you’re so awful? “Yes. Definitely. An actor’s life is not a good life to be self-aware. It’s very easy to be un-self-aware.”
Presumably the magnetic pull back towards being an arsehole is strong, although, says Foster, she has strategies in place. “I think, healthily, I created compartments around things. But the compartments are problematic for my relationships.” She laughs. “I don’t want people to know me in this context.” She indicates the surroundings of the interview. “This is just mine. My friends don’t know it, my kids didn’t know what I did for a living till quite late. They had no idea. I never brought them on set.”
That’s a smart thing to do, isn’t it?” I guess it’s smart. But there are also other actors whose young people say, “Oh, I lived in Romania [when my parents were filming] and I did this and that. . . “And I didn’t do any of that with my kids. Maybe they’d had affairs, or something. The fact is, he says, “there’s nothing general about being a public figure since you were young, and there’s a lot of negotiation around that: figuring out how to be a total person. “
It can’t have been easy for her and yet she still gets a lot of stick for decisions she has made over the years. “And I will never be able to explain,” she says, “because unless you were there, you don’t get it. There are choices that I made that people can say, ‘Why did you do that?’ Well, you didn’t walk in my shoes. Try to walk in my shoes and you’ll find out.”
I have one quick question about The Silence of the Lambs. One thing about Foster’s acting is that, because of the intelligence she brings to her roles, she very rarely caves in to cliche. When she won the best actress Oscar for The Silence of the Lambs in 1992, it was for a role that felt like nothing we had seen on screen before. The chemistry between Anthony Hopkins as Hannibal Lecter and Foster as the trainee FBI agent made the movie, but, of the two of them, it was Foster’s film.
There’s a scene at the end where Clarice gropings her way through the killer’s space in the dead dark, and he looks at her through night-vision goggles. And her hand, which holds the gun in front of her, trembles with nervousness. the face of all the repetitive depictions of the tough FBI agent. She shudders with concern and my question is: is this detail Foster’s concept or director Jonathan Demme’s?
“It’s my idea. ” I knew it!” That seemed right to me. There was something unforeseen about Clarice: she was capable of power, but she was so vulnerable and had this smallness. She identified that she wasn’t physically powerful, and it didn’t happen to me that there’s nothing revolutionary about it. You play someone who can just be what we think of as a male character: the action guy. But that’s not the case: it’s Clarice.
Perhaps Foster is simply describing himself. The contrast between smallness and strength is at the heart of its appeal and is also reflected in its ability to impose off-screen barriers. “I’m not a multitasker. I’m a strangely directed person. If there’s a spectrum, it’s my spectrum. It doesn’t matter if planes fly by or someone calls me, if I’m aiming for something. I’m actually smart to go, no thanks, I don’t do that.
Seriously. She probably wouldn’t be moved or possibly unintimidated, and at this point in her life, she probably wouldn’t feel bad about it either. “You can get skin as an actor, not only for being criticized, but also for being criticized. “to [tell what to do], ‘Can you move your frame there?’Can you do that, can you get excited here?’ I’ve learned how to do all that. And possibly it wouldn’t. For decades, Foster was publicly reprimanded for doing things wrong and explained to her that she deserved to do so. “And now,” he said, looking for me insistently: “I’m like, I’m going to do it for my job and I’m not going to do it for you. “
True Detective: Night Country will be available on Sky Atlantic and Now from January 15.