Jodie Foster, Ascendant at 61, Reckons With Her Complex Mother’s Ghost

Jodie Foster walks into the room smiling. It’s something she has learned to do over her decades of stardom: to beam at strangers and let them ask her searching questions. She wears a kind of invisible armor over her elegant white shirt, understandable for someone who has dealt with more than her (or anyone’s) fair share of creeps and stalkers. I don’t quite fall into either of those categories, though I have been watching Foster for as long as I can remember, starting with movies like Freaky Friday and Candleshoe and aging up along with her.

She’s had a career any actor would dream of: her first Oscar nomination at age 14, her directorial debut before the age of 40, and a Cecil B. DeMille lifetime achievement award at 50. Foster’s radiant performance in last year’s Nyad has landed her more noms. And that’s just an appetizer for her riveting role in the new season of the HBO series True Detective: Night Country, in which she plays Liz Danvers, a gruff “Alaskan Karen” who is police chief of the icy fictional town of Ennis. Danvers and officer Evangeline Navarro (former boxer Kali Reis) find themselves entangled in a mystical mystery that ties together the murder of an Indigenous woman and the disappearance of eight male scientists from a climate change research station.

Foster never expected to be doing any of this at the age of 61. Her manager-mother convinced her that her Hollywood career would be washed up at 18, and, later, that directing was the wrong career move. “She had fear, so that was what she gave me,” Foster says now, four years after her mother’s death. That anxiety never seems to have quite dissipated. Yet sitting in front of me in a West Hollywood hotel room, Foster seems serene and excited to talk about her spiritual experience on True Detective, playing an out lesbian in Nyad—and why she’s happy she was turned down for the lead part in The Blue Lagoon.

Vanity Fair: Before I walked in here, I was thinking about how I grew up watching you play tough, smart child and teen characters in movies from Bugsy Malone to Foxes that were very different from most of the roles out there. They really created a space in the 1970s for a different kind of girlhood onscreen.

Jodie Foster: I guess I got lucky that I was the face of a tomboy girl, right? We all knew they existed but they just weren’t onscreen.

At what point did you start thinking about yourself as someone who could shape your career and make choices?

My mom did that for me. My mom, who was an amazing woman, had been a publicist when she was young. She was from a pre-feminist era and she didn’t have a lot of faith in her own abilities in some ways. So I think she kind of vicariously got me to do that. She was very clear: You will be respected, you will have this type of career. So when the Brat Pack [came along], for example, I didn’t do any of those movies.

I didn’t really think about my career until after the Oscar nomination [for Taxi Driver] when I was 14. And she said that my career would be over by the time I was 18. She’d always say to me, what are you going to be when you grow up? A doctor, a lawyer, a politician? So when I went to college, she sold her house and moved into a small place. We were ready to say, Jodie will probably never work again. I did movies while I was in college to make money. I thought, I’ll do this until they tell me I’m not going to do this anymore. Then I got out of college and figured, I’ll just give it a last hurrah because I thought I was gonna go to grad school. And then it all snowballed and after The Accused, I said: I guess I’m not going to grad school!

Winning an Oscar for The Accused was a good sign your acting career wasn’t over. But I can’t believe how pragmatically you approached it all.

Well, I do approach things pragmatically. That’s the strong part of my brain. I make charts, I make lists, I cross things off. And I think that’s been a gift because most people who are attracted to being an actor aren’t like that, so it’s made my acting a little different. I’m an intellectual and I have this intellectual process. You’re able to identify the choreography and not just dance—you do both simultaneously.

Did you watch that Brooke Shields documentary last year, where she talked about what it was like to be sexualized as a young performer?

Yeah, I saw that documentary. For me, it was really like, ack.

Did you turn down the role in The Blue Lagoon?

No, they turned me down. I don’t think I would have done it anyway, that was not my kind of thing. But they turned me down cause I wasn’t beautiful and whatever. But I think my mom had a very clear awareness. And I think maybe that’s what the difference was.

So once you graduated from college, you were finally in control of your career?

There were a lot of things, like Silence of the Lambs, my mom didn’t want me to do. That’s kind of when our paths started diverging. She was like, why are you doing this when you’ve just won an Oscar? The real part in the movie is Anthony Hopkins’s part, and you’re gonna play this quiet, good girl. Why would you do that? Even me directing for the first time, she was like: You probably won’t work past 40 and this is a moment in your life where you should be pursuing acting. Why are you going off on this directing tangent?

It sounds like your mother made you extremely aware of a ticking clock for women in Hollywood.

Yeah, she had old Hollywood ideas. Mostly she had fear, so that was what she gave me. I feel lucky that I could identify that. It still affected me, but I could identify it and think: Don’t let that get to you, that’s just her being afraid.

I didn’t know what to expect from this new season of True Detective, but all the performances are great.

Sometimes you get something that’s blessed. I feel like Silence of the Lambs had that and maybe Little Man Tate, but it’s pretty rare. You meet the director and you’re like, “Love her!” And you see a costar where you’re like, “I hope she says yes!” And then everybody ends up doing their best work. Maybe they’ll never be as good again, right? Because it’s part of a tapestry of blessedness or something. I mean, it almost never happens.

It does feel like magic when something turns out the way it was intended, even if really great people are involved.

This is the first time in a really long time that I felt just 100% excited about it. And I think it’s because of the tree-planting ceremony in Reykjavik. [Laughs.] All the cast members drove out to the middle of nowhere in these Jeeps and we all held hands and planted trees. We said all different prayers, because there were Iñupiat people and Greenlanders and us. People just made shit up and we had hot chocolate in this cool little cabin, and everything—like everything—locked into place. When we needed snow, we got snow. When we needed to not have any snow, we didn’t get it. We didn’t have one thing go wrong, which is weird…. I’m sure there are ghosts among us and they’re very happy with the show because everything went our way.

And you think it was the tree ceremony? You’ll have to start doing that for every project.

I think this one was special, because there were ancestors involved. And the series does have a spiritual dimension to it, which is mirrored by the psychological dimension.

Did you have a spiritual bent coming into True Detective?

Surprisingly yes, though I have a lot of cynicism. As I get older, I am more and more open to the fact that I just don’t know, and just more humble and less afraid to be foolish about all that stuff. But the Carl Sagan in me is still open to saying: Potentially this is explainable by science. I’m still wedded to the idea that there are explanations for things—we just don’t have them and we may never have them.

There’s a bit of The X Files’ Mulder-Scully dynamic in the show. “I want to believe” versus scientific skepticism.

I was on The X-Files! I played the voice of a tattoo. And yes, there is. Silence of the Lambs is the precursor to that, I think, and Issa’s got a very interesting take on the influence of Silence on Seven, and the influence of Seven on True Detective. We’re the next incarnation.

Did you have much input?

I was there from the beginning and it really evolved and changed. The original Danvers was quite vulnerable and she was really having a hard time because she had just lost a child. I’m 60, what child am I having at 58? So we had to go back to: Who is this person? I felt like it needed to be somebody who really had their foot firmly in the white world in some ways and was kind of lazy and who didn’t want to see the other side of things. [The arc] would lead me to support and back up the spiritual journey of Navarro.

Was Indigenous culture always central to this season?

It was the whole draw for me: to create something where the Indigenous voice is central. Any impulse and impact that I had at the beginning of developing my character was really: How does Danvers support their story? And somehow sort of reverse engineering her being Alaska Karen. She’s making jokes that aren’t funny and just being an asshole—being that white voice in the midst of this Indigenous story. It’s shocking how many “Indigenous” movies now are about white guys.

There’s also a long lineage of movies and shows—like the original True Detective—centered around male detectives, where the only sizable parts for women are corpses.

We’re the opposite, right? There’s men that are missing—naked dead men. We think that’s [the mystery], but actually, the real story is so much deeper and so much older. It’s this idea that we’ve disturbed the natural way, and Mother Earth wants revenge. For Indigenous people we met in Alaska, their lives are interwoven with people who passed away. They still walk among them. It’s just a part of the way they live. That informs our supernatural element.

The showrunner has described this season as a “dark mirror” of the “male” and “sweaty” season one: This time it’s “cold and it’s dark and it’s female.”

The femaleness of it is very complicated, it’s not all pretty. Some of it is about who we are to each other and how we pull each other down. I think that both characters are so flawed. Like the first True Detectives, they can drive with each other in that car and hate each other, but they have each other’s backs and they’ll die for the other one.

Bonnie Stoll, Diana Nyad, Jodie Foster, and Annette Bening at the special presentation of the Telluride Golden Medallion Award on January 6, 2023.Gilbert Flores/Getty Images

You were focused on directing for a long time, and it feels like suddenly you’ve reemerged with these two amazing characters in a row: Danvers and Diana Nyad’s best friend Bonnie Stoll in Nyad. Was that intentional?

They’re two entirely different pieces of work that are meant for different people, really. But I knew Bonnie and Diana from Christmas parties and barbecues and I just love those two, and really felt drawn to being a part of bringing them to the screen. Even though we’re not that far off in terms of age—we’re 10, 12 years apart—they’re more of my mom’s generation. They’re women of a certain age who didn’t have children, at a time when their families couldn’t understand them or rejected them. Their friends became their family. That bond is stronger than anything, all of which I thought was really important for people to see onscreen.

Nyad features this complicated relationship between two headstrong lesbian friends, and it’s about these menopausal women who refuse to quietly fade away. It’s not about them as sexual creatures or even romantic objects. Who knew you could do that?

We never tell that story. Women hit 50 and then that’s it: They’re completely irrelevant, and they don’t do anything important. The 50s were really tough for me, and it’s why I didn’t really want to act very much. I felt like people wanted me to compete with my old self. I was confused, like: What am I supposed to be doing? When I hit 60—and maybe it’s a chemical thing—I suddenly became completely content. I find the real beauty is supporting other people’s time. It’s really not my time. That was a hard thing for me to say in my 50s, but for my 60s, I want to be supporting new ideas that new people are thinking.

How did you delve into the role? It could be seen as a self-sacrificing, egoless character.

Of all my movies, I think this was the most difficult development. The script was so difficult. I can’t control that, there’s only so much I can do. So I’ve just got to get Bonnie right. If it had been a fictional story, I think they would have tried to manufacture things—either they would eventually end up being a couple and realize that they need to be together or they would have made Bonnie do other things, like calling up the financiers and saying, we need money. But that wasn’t how it was. It’s the Diana show, whether the filmmaking team liked it or not. So we were able to keep that because that was true.

Was Bonnie the first outwardly queer part that you’ve played?

I guess so. I think I have an affair with Nastassja Kinski in Hotel New Hampshire.

Wow. That’s going back to the ’80s.

Yeah, although what do you know about some of the characters I play? What do you know?

That’s true.

And it’s not necessarily germane.

This interview has been edited and condensed for clarity.