Jodie Foster Has Nothing Left to Prove
Shirt, $1,800, skirt, Valentino. Tie, Valentino Garavani, $490. Earrings, ring, Harry Winston.
Jodie Foster won’t read anything you post about this article. “I don’t really care about other people’s opinions,” says the actress-director-producer, who has more than 100 Hollywood credits to her name and zero social media presence. “Why do you care about what some guy in his pajamas thinks about what you should do with your life?”
If there is a theme to Foster’s current era, it’s this: After more than 50 years in the spotlight, she is living like no one is watching. Meeting up at The Spaniard near her place in New York City’s West Village—her hair still wet from a shower—Foster chats warmly about her home life with wife Alexandra Hedison, her two sons, and her ladies-only fantasy football league smack chat. When we finish, she’ll run back to tip the waitstaff a little extra and walk me to the subway.
Blazer, $698, pants, $448, Polo Ralph Lauren. Bra, Intimissimi, $59.
This sense of ease feels new for a star who admits she had a “control mechanism [that] was built at a very young age.” She earned her first Oscar nomination at 14 for Taxi Driver and was named Best Actress twice by age 30. Her awards are so many they have their own Wikipedia page. Foster turned 60 last year, and it’s a number she’s welcomed after a challenging decade when she was raising teenagers and directing, but hardly seen onscreen. “I was still being asked to open on 3,000 screens, and I didn’t really want the pressure of that,” she says. “And the roles were confused. People are confused about how to write about women in their fifties, just like women in their fifties are confused about themselves. Fifty through 60 is kind of tough, still holding on to and competing with your past self.”
She had done so much, but was it enough? “I went through a period where I was like, ‘Wow, I had these goals about writing and directing, and I didn’t meet any of them.’ And I couldn’t stop feeling like a terrible failure—like I hadn’t lived up to all the lofty expectations that I had for myself. I just kept telling that story to myself over and over again. And then something shifted. And now I feel like I have fewer goals in film than I’ve ever had, and I’m happier than I’ve ever been.”
Dress, Balenciaga, $3,950.
Foster no longer worries about the bottom line (“What do I care if a film doesn’t make any money? It’s not my problem”) or how big her role is. She picked up a Best Supporting Actress Golden Globe in 2021 for The Mauritanian (she accepted from her couch, clad in a pair of Prada pajamas); has drawn Oscar buzz this year for another supporting role as a swim coach in Nyad; and next year will appear as embittered Alaska detective Liz Danvers in Season 4 of HBO’s True Detective.
At a certain age, she says, “it’s someone else’s time. You might as well do more of the things you love, less of the things you hate, and stop beating yourself up for something you can’t control—that you’ve gotten older and there is a relevance change. And there’s something amazing about acting in my sixties and supporting other people. I think I enjoy it more than anything I’ve ever done.”
Shirt, $1,800, skirt, $21,000, Valentino. Tie, Valentino Garavani. Earrings, ring, Harry Winston. Pumps, Manolo Blahnik, $725.
On being famous from a young age
“I find myself tapping people on the shoulder and apologizing about who I was when I was in my twenties, saying ‘I can’t believe I was so self-involved and so unaware of my own privileges.’ I was a terrible friend because I was busy shooting. Unless you have that time as a regular person, you become stunted in so many ways. I accomplished a lot, but as a person, I was really behind. It’s a hard lesson to learn, because you have to look in the mirror and say, ‘I failed a lot of people, and I wasn’t the person I could have been.’”
Jumpsuit, Alexander McQueen, $3,390. Earrings, Harry Winston.
On being a introvert in Hollywood
“I’m not a lampshade-on-my-head, dancing-on-the-table person. I’m an introvert. I like to read. I should never have been an actor. So it is a chasm for me every time. I had to learn to invert that a bit to keep my head above water as an actor.”
On her advice for younger actresses
“I think it’s almost entirely maternal advice. It’s not really about career, because career choices are personal about how you want to complete yourself and what’s fascinating to you. I find myself reaching out to girls who could be my daughters and saying, ‘Wait a minute, you keep doing dumb things on publicity tours. What’s going on with you? This is a little self-sabotage. You know better than that. Who’s letting you do that? And where’s your mom?’ I do have this really big soft spot for the young actresses who came up as young people, because I just don’t know how they survive without some mother around the way I had a mom around. To be able to say, ‘You’re overexposed,’ or ‘You’re torturing yourself,’ or ‘You have to have faith in your talent. You can go away for two years and have a life and come back and there will be work for you. Yeah, maybe it won’t be in some franchise, but what do you care? This is your life.’”
Dress, Bottega Veneta.
On her social media blackout
“I’m okay with sacrificing a certain amount of success or access in order for me to have the life that I want. So yeah, my friends have it, and I look over their shoulders, and if it was just the babies and dogs and dancing, it would be amazing. But I know how to take care of myself. And maybe that’s a product of my baggage in the terrible world that I came out of, like my own survival mechanism. But I know what it takes to survive, and I really feel bad for young people.
“I have a pretty strong stomach for horror, and blood and all that stuff, because I grew up making those movies. And my wife can’t see a single one. She can’t even see even somebody upset before she goes to sleep, because she’ll be up all night. And I was like, ‘Well, why don’t you build that muscle?’ She’s like, ‘I don’t want to build that muscle. Why do I have to build that muscle?’ And I think it’s probably true that [younger people] are building muscles about criticism and they’re becoming inured to it, and somehow surviving a different way. So who am I to judge, about how that works? But I know that I, for one, think celebrity culture is already toxic. To try to have celebrity culture be a part of the fabric of who we are as people in the world, it’s just really like…why would you do that to yourself?”
Coat, Prada.
On the director she would like to work with
“The Daniels. They made my favorite movie perhaps of all time, Everything Everywhere All at Once. That’s the film that I will return to over and over again whenever I feel depressed or sad. I first saw it with one of my sons, and we held hands and pinched each other and cried for 45 minutes afterward. And then I saw it with my other son a week later, and it just opened a portal of connection and understanding and hope. He started telling me everything from his high school that he’d never told me, and we were walking in the rain crying and opening up. And I was like, This is what film can do.”
Coat, Prada. Earrings, Harry Winston. Shoes, Dior, $1,390.
On becoming a director
“Forget women directors, I worked with no women on sets for the first 20 years of my career. Sometimes there was a script supervisor or makeup hair artist, but most of the time when I was young there wasn’t, it was just me and a whole bunch of guys. So I have this real fondness and connection for these fathers and brothers that brought me up, that taught me everything. I benefited from those relationships, and I wouldn’t be a director today, certainly, if I didn’t have those old men who believed in me. So I don’t have the same story as a lot of people have. I got first dibs and hopefully I’ve been able to bring other women up.”
On the dominance of superhero movies
“It’s a phase. It’s a phase that’s lasted a little too long for me, but it’s a phase, and I’ve seen so many different phases. Hopefully people will be sick of it soon. The good ones—like Iron Man, Black Panther, The Matrix—I marvel at those movies, and I’m swept up in the entertainment of it, but that’s not why I became an actor. And those movies don’t change my life. Hopefully there’ll be room for everything else.”
Blazer, $698, pants, $448, Polo Ralph Lauren. Bra, Intimissimi, $59.
On the Hollywood moment that amazed her
“Coming into the cutting room as a director and going back to those stages that I grew up on. Driving through the gate, having a parking pass, walking into the cutting room every single day with your backpack, taking a nap on the couch. I feel like that’s the Hollywood moment for me.”
Hair by Adir Abergel at A-Frame Agency; makeup by Pati Dubroff for Chanel; manicure by Ashlie Johnson at The Wall Group; produced by LOLA Production.
A version of this article appears in the December 2023/January 2024 issue of ELLE.
This story is part of ELLE’s 2023 Women in Hollywood portfolio, our annual celebration of the women we loved watching this year. Click the link below for all the cover stories.