Jodie Foster has said her early success in Hollywood made her “too dangerous to touch” and was the most likely reason she was protected from sexual abuse as a child actor.
In a new interview, the 63-year-old Oscar winner looked back at her career and talked about why she believed she didn’t face the “terrible experiences” other child actors did.
“I’ve really had to examine that, like, how did I get saved?” she told NPR’s Fresh Air. “There were microaggressions, of course. Anybody who’s in the workplace has had misogynist microaggressions. That’s just a part of being a woman, right? But what kept me from having those bad experiences, those terrible experiences?”
The critical difference, Foster said, was that she had a certain amount of professional authority unusually early which placed her outside the category of vulnerable actors.
“I had a certain amount of power by the time I was, like, 12. So by the time I had my first Oscar nomination, I was part of a different category of people that had power and I was too dangerous to touch. I could've ruined people's careers or I could’ve called ‘Uncle,’ so I wasn't on the block,” she said.
Foster made her acting debut in a television commercial for sunscreen in 1965 at the age of three and continued to get more work in advertising. At the age of six, she made her feature film debut in Napoleon and Samantha, and continued to play smaller roles on television and in films, including Becky Thatcher in Tom Sawyer (1973).
In 1976, she was cast as a child prostitute in Martin Scorsese’s Taxi Driver when she was 12 years old. The performance, widely considered her breakout role, earned the actor her first Oscar nomination for best supporting actress.
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.
The Panic Room star said that predatory behaviour in Hollywood was more rooted in power imbalances than individual personalities.
“Predators use whatever they can in order to manipulate and get people to do what they want them to do. And that's much easier when the person is younger, when the person is weaker, when a person has no power,” she said.
“That’s precisely what predatory behaviour is about: using power in order to diminish people, in order to dominate them.”
She added that her “head-first” personality might also have made it tough for predators to approach her.
“I approach the world in a head-first way. It’s very difficult to emotionally manipulate me because I don't operate with my emotions on the surface,” she said.
“There’s two things that can happen as a child actor: one is you develop resilience, and you come up with a plan and a way to survive intact, and there are real advantages to that in life.”
Last month, Foster talked about acting and why she believed it was a “cruel job” that she wouldn't have chosen for herself.
“I would never have chosen to be an actor, I don’t have the personality of an actor. I’m not somebody that wants to dance on a table and, you know, sing songs for people,” she said at the Marrakech film festival in December.
She said her experiences had made her reach out to “young child actors of this era”.
“I feel like, wait, where are their parents? And why is nobody telling them that they should stop doing so many movies or maybe not be so drunk on the red carpet?” the actor said. “I want to take care of them because I know how dangerous it is.”
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