Foster change
Adapting to new ways of working keeps Jodie Foster’s career vital
By her own admission, Jodie Foster is having a moment. Years can go by when the two time Oscar winning actor and director seems absent from the screen – her last major film was almost three years ago. Yet, right now, she’s everywhere. “I go through periods,” the motherof-two says from Los Angeles. “And this was a little bit of an acting period. “I grew up on film sets and I’d go from show to show. As I got older I realised I had to regenerate, had to have something to say and live my life with my kids. So maybe I have a different approach than a lot of actors.”
In November, she won a Golden Globe nomination for her role in the film Nyad (won this week by Da’Vine Joy Randolph for The Holdovers), about athlete Diana Nyad and her quest to swim from Florida to Cuba.
Now, Foster has swapped the warm Caribbean waters for the icy chill of northern Alaska and the lead character in True Detective: Night Country, which screens on Binge and Foxtel. It’s her first major role in a TV series in 40 years.
Foster’s is the fourth instalment of the True Detective franchise, which debuted in 2014. Its first series was headlined by Matthew McConaughey and Woody Harrelson who, along with Foster, are executive producers on Night Country.
It’s already being acclaimed as a return to form for True Detective.
Rolling Stone said season four was “must see TV, thanks to Jodie Foster,” while the UK’s Telegraph called it “spectacular, terrifying and unforgettable”.
In the 24-hour darkness of the Arctic winter, Foster’s Detective Liz Danvers is busy keeping the peace between a mining company and an Indigenous community.
What she doesn’t need is the disappearance of eight scientists from a nearby research station. It’s as if the men collectively decided on a whim to wander out into the inky – and very deadly – blackness, leaving behind a polar Mary Celeste, with lunches half eaten, the TV on and the should-bejaunty-but-in-this-contextincredibly-creepy Twist and Shout blaring from the speakers. A scrawled symbol and a severed tongue add to the nightmarish tableau.
Foster says there’s a direct line between Detective Danvers and perhaps her most famous role: Detective Clarice Starling in 1991’s Silence of the Lambs.
“Both of them lived in an all-male society in the police and they’ve had to toughen up and figure out how to combat misogyny.”
The 61-year-old, who married photographer Alexandra Hedison in 2014, calls Silence of the Lambs the “great grandfather” of Night Country.
“First came Silence, then Seven and then True Detective one and now True Detective four. I feel like the idea that the eerie, messed-up, horror quality of a place mirrors the psychological drama of the psyche of the detectives.”
The driving force behind Night Country is Mexican director Issa Lopez, whose acclaimed 2017 crimehorror film Tigers Are Not Afraid scored 51 awards.
She wrote the whole series and directed every episode and was also the showrunner on True Detective: Night Country.
“She’s the best actor alive, it’s as simple as that,” says Lopez. “The places she can take a character, the range, the discipline, the depth and the intelligence. I think she ruined me as a director, honestly.”
A strong element of the drama is the local Inupiaq people.
“The more I understood about the towns that I was representing in Alaska, where the makeup is at least 70 per cent Indigenous, the more I felt it would be unfair and stupid to create a story where Indigenous characters were in the background or were just the ones with a conflict that the white characters from outside come to solve,” she says.
So much so, she changed one of the key characters – Danver’s offsider Evangeline Navarro, played by champion boxer turned actor Kali Reis, who has a Native American background, from Latino to mixed race Indigenous.
Set in Alaska, due to logistics and a lack of infrastructure, True Detective: Night Country was filmed in Iceland in the dead of winter.
“There is something weird about doing so many nights,” says Foster.
“I had fantasy football so that helped. No matter how cold and dark it was outside, I always had football.”
And Foster explains her fourdecade build-up to TV acting.
“I did my last series probably when I was like 10 or 11 and then I never did it again. In the old days, people that did TV didn’t do features and vice versa. This was the first time I was like ‘this is something I need to do’.”
She’s not been shy in directing TV shows, with a CV that includes credits in hit series Orange Is the New Black, House of Cards and Black Mirror.
Foster acknowledges that right now she is on, rather than behind, screens.
“If the material comes around and I feel like it’s something that I want to say, it usually means that I’m ready to work,” she says. To do this “acting period” Foster said she “put some of my directing things to the side”. “I have a feeling the next period will be more of a directing period,” she says.
Catch Foster in the moment while you can.