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Jodie Foster is 62 years old and, because she’s been acting since she was two years old, she’s achieved six decades of success both in front of and behind the camera. She’s had an incredible career, winning multiple Oscars as an actress as well as other accolades. She has a preference for directing, though, and that perspective really shone through while she discussed today’s crop of young actors.
The Maverick star has been spending more time in front of the camera of late than she has in recent years. She tells Variety that she has little interest in “acting for the sake of acting” and that for her, the work has to really speak to her in some way for it to be worth doing. This is apparently what separates Foster from her younger counterparts, as she says many young actors seem to just want to act, and they don’t care how or where. She said…
When I was a kid, I worked so much that by the time that I was 18, I needed to take a different approach. 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. 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.
It’s certainly true that Jodie Foster had done more by the age of 18 than many actors achieve in an entire career. She had over 40 film and TV appearances on her resume by that point. She had an iconic role in Martin Scorsese’s Taxi Driver but also starred in some early Disney projects, including the original version of Freaky Friday and the kid-friendly mystery Candleshoe. (The latter of those two films was likely the reason Foster didn’t play Princess Leia in the original Star Wars.)
Foster certainly did take a different approach starting in 1980, which was the year she turned 18. Her roles became much more mature, and that resulted in a lot of acclaim and a pair of Best Actress Oscars. She notably played a rape survivor in The Accused and later took on her most famous role as Clarice Starling in The Silence of the Lambs alongside Anthony Hopkins.
We can see some of Foster’s thought process at work in the roles she didn’t take. Despite her incredible success with The Silence of the Lambs, she didn’t return to her role for the sequel, Hannibal. Anthony Hopkins wishes he’d done the same.
To be clear, Foster doesn’t seem to indicate there’s anything wrong with acting for its own sake, and not caring so much about it. In many ways, that probably makes acting a lot easier. It’s just not the way Foster herself works, and the way she’s approached Hollywood has certainly worked for her.