❛❛ There are different ways of being a woman ❞
For a long time, Jodie Foster was the most visible lesbian in Hollywood (not that she really wanted to talk about it). Now, she feels liberated – and is helping the younger generation follow suit.
It is roughly 58 years since Jodie Foster’s first acting role, and there are things she won’t put up with on set. She won’t be told how to get into character. She won’t tolerate what she calls ‘voodoo’ directing, that is, am-dram, shake-your-body-out nonsense. She won’t respond to certain types of ‘alpha’ interference from people up the industry chain. (The only time she submits to bossy producers, she says, is when they are ‘super passive-aggressive British people’ – a type she just can’t resist.) In work mode, and outside interactions with the press, she is conscientious, matter-of-fact, with almost no performance anxiety or self-consciousness. ‘I approach a story or character in the same way I do a book report,’ she says: ‘I like to make it pragmatic.’
The 61-year-old is charming and pleasant, with gel-spiked hair, tiny-waisted black trousers and a crisp white shirt popped at the collar. She could be a matador, or someone in high-end catering, and the sheer familiarity of her face and manner is startling. The voice and smile, the teasing laugh and intensity evoke decades of iconic roles, from Clarice Starling in The Silence of the Lambs and Sarah Tobias in The Accused, back to her childhood roles in Taxi Driver
and Bugsy Malone. She kicks off her mules to reveal red-painted toenails, and tucks her legs under her, an unstudied gesture – or a knowing one.
We’re here ostensibly to talk about True Detective: Night Country, the fourth season of the bro-y cult anthology show previously stewarded by Matthew McConaughey and Woody Harrelson, and that, this season, features some women. Jodie plays Liz Danvers, chief of police of Ennis, a godforsaken small town in the far north of Alaska, where we join the story on the eve of permanent night: the two months of the year when that part of the world is in darkness. It’s a police procedural, an odd-couple buddy drama, an affecting depiction of North American indigenous life and, like the other True Detective shows, a tale of the supernatural that doesn’t make a whole lot of sense but still offers a highly enjoyable ride. Jodie’s cop, ‘Alaska Karen’, as she puts it, is lonely and embittered. As roles go it’s not a big stretch for her, but there is a satisfying arc for her character that’s clearly her kind of thing.
A more distinctive feature of the show is the relatively young cast and crew. Kali Reis, who is brilliant as Evangeline Navarro, Liz Danvers’ sidekick, was until recently a professional boxer; director Issa López is a successful Mexican writer who has made a handful of Spanish-language movies, including the fantasyhorror film Tigers Are Not Afraid, but this is her first big project in the US. Jodie, by contrast, has been in about 50 productions, has directed multiple films and TV episodes, and has won two best actress Oscars (for The Accused and The Silence of the Lambs). Some singular quality in Jodie that is hard to describe
– a kind of flinching intensity, perhaps – along with the sheer volume and standard of her work, puts her close to being an icon. What can it have been like for the young people working with her?
She won’t have this, of course. ‘Well, I’m pretty fun. I mean, I don’t take anything seriously. I make jokes all the time.’ She pauses. ‘And, you know, I’m not an expert.’
Of course she is the definition of an expert. She’s been doing this job since she was 3 years old! Imagine Robert De Niro or Al Pacino saying such a thing. Jodie smiles. ‘Not really. I just know me; I don’t really know anybody else, and even as a director – I’m not really an actor’s director, interestingly.’
Jodie’s directorial debut, the 1991 movie Little Man Tate ,in which she also starred, has been followed in her directing career by a handful of movies and individual episodes of TV shows such as Orange Is the New Black and Black Mirror.
‘I really let the actors do their thing and just hope I’ve cast correctly. I’m not somebody who can tease a performance on take 200. I believe that you cast, and allow something to happen on screen, and if you do it fast enough, people
‘There’s nothing normal about being a public figure from the time when you were young.’
don’t overthink themselves.’
She has very particular requirements when it comes to being directed herself. ‘I like it when directors tell me what they want and say things like faster, slower. I’m not interested in directors who are like – she puts on a whispery, luvvie-ish voice – “Here, let me shake you!” They might have to do that with other people, because they’re young or they’ve never acted before. I have watched directors do that with them and…’ She snorts. ‘You’d better not do that with me.’
This is the second consecutive project in which Jodie has worked with less experienced directors. On the recent Netflix movie Nyad, in which Jodie plays Bonnie Stoll, the best friend and coach of marathon swimmer Diana Nyad, she was working with an even less seasoned team: first-time feature directors Elizabeth Chai Vasarhelyi and Jimmy Chin, who had previously only worked in documentary film. I loved Nyad, partly because it was so funny and well written, partly because Annette Bening is brilliant in the title role, and partly because of Jodie, who is more relaxed on screen than anything I’ve seen her in since she made Freaky Friday at the age of 13. It is nice, for once, to see her playing someone who isn’t slogging through a trauma or being launched alone into space.
In Nyad, she is loose-limbed and full of easy humour and jokes. As far as I’m aware, it’s the first time Jodie has played an out lesbian. The press around the film, particularly when hacks brought up the fact that both lead characters were gay, was customarily awkward. Questions about her life aren’t overtly hostile or mocking these days, but there is often still a judgement behind them: from straight people, broadly, why are you still so bent out of shape by this; and from the gay press, why didn’t you do more back in the day?
I tell Jodie I loved Nyad and she says, brightly, ‘Oh, thanks! I love those two [Bonnie and Diana], so that was the number-one reason to do it. I knew them from barbecues and stuff.’
There is a trauma narrative in Nyad that is subtly handled. As a teen swim champion, Diana was molested by her coach. But the film focuses on her record-breaking swim from Cuba to Florida, undertaken at the age of 64 and in the face of immense physical risks. ‘The important thing to Diana and me and Annette was, we cannot think that she achieves the swim because of the molestation. My happiest moment in the film is when Bonnie says as an aside, “Oh, I read in the paper that he [the coach] died.” And Diana says, “He didn’t mark me; it’s just that sometimes, every once in a while, I feel like I’m 14 again and fighting this stuff.”’
Personally, I liked the hangout scenes at the start of the movie, when the two are chilling at home in Los Angeles, playing table tennis and Scrabble. ‘Yeah. I love those scenes,’ she agrees.
To achieve Bonnie’s washboard stomach, Jodie worked out like an athlete for six months; she
‘I do a lot of reaching out to young actresses. I’m compelled. Because it was hard growing up.’
swans about the movie in cut-off shorts and a vest, brandishing her clipboard and whistle like the world’s buffest PE teacher. She has always been portrayed as a nerd, but in light of the evidence isn’t she really just as much of a jock? Jodie laughs loudly. ‘I’ve been waiting to be objectified my entire life, so I’m very happy that people have started talking about my body parts.’
Jodie spoke recently about her 50s being a tricky decade of transition in which she had to figure out, in the absence of many role models, how to be a woman above a certain age in Hollywood. She found an answer in friendships both up and down the age range. ‘I have a friend whom I adore who’s 80. She’s a college professor; she lived in a commune in the early ’70s; she’s an extraordinary person. I get to see what’s ahead, what’s possible. For all of her accomplishments, what she keeps saying, which I think is true, is that the greatest thing is helping communities of other women.’
What does she think young people in her industry need to hear? ‘They need to learn how to relax, how to think less, how to come up with something that’s theirs.’
I mention that I saw a photo of her recently with the young British actor Bella Ramsey, the non-binary star of the HBO zombie hit The Last of Us who, at 20 years old, is on the brink of megastardom. In December, Bella introduced Jodie at the Elle magazine Women in Hollywood celebration, a pairing Jodie says she requested herself. ‘I reached out to Bella, because we’d never met, and said, “I want you to introduce me at this thing,” which is a wonderful event about actors and people in the movies, but is also very much a fashion thing. Which means it’s determining who represents us. [The organisers] are very proud of themselves because they’ve got every ethnicity, and I’m like, yeah, but all the attendees are still wearing heels and eyelashes. There are other ways of being a woman, and it’s really important for people to see that. And Bella, who gave the best speech, was wearing the most perfect suit, beautifully tailored, with a middle parting and no makeup.’
As a mentoring relationship, it’s part of a pattern, Jodie says.
‘I do a lot of reaching out to young actresses. I’m compelled. Because it was hard growing up.’ When she looks at Bella, who in 2023 told British Vogue, ‘I’m not 100% straight,’ does she feel a pang of sympathy for her younger self? ‘Yes. But I had my mom, you know.’ Jodie’s late mother, Brandy, was a force of nature in the entertainment industry, raising her four children in Los Angeles and shepherding Jodie from the age of 3, when she first put her up for commercials, to stardom.
Could she have worn a suit and had a severe middle parting with no makeup when she was coming up as a young actor? ‘No,’ she says. ‘Because we didn’t have freedom. And hopefully that’s what the vector of authenticity that’s happening offers: the possibility of real freedom. We had other things that were good. And I would say, I did the best I could for my generation.
I was very busy understanding where I fitted in and where I wanted to be in terms of feminism. But my lens wasn’t wide enough. I lived in an incredibly segregated world.’
For all her cheerleading of Gen Z, Jodie isn’t above being irritated by them. ‘They’re really annoying, especially in the workplace. They’re like, “Nah, I’m not feeling it today; I’m gonna come in at 10.30 am.” Or, like, in emails, I’ll tell them this is all grammatically incorrect; did you not check your spelling? And they’re like, “Why would I do that; isn’t that kind of limiting?”’
Jodie has two sons who are in their 20s, Kit and Charles, whom she had with her ex-partner, film producer Cydney Bernard. The couple split up in 2008, and for the past 10 years she has been married to Alexandra Hedison, a photographer. A funny effect of her sons’ upbringing, Jodie says, was their early confusion over how, precisely, to be male. ‘My two don’t like sports; they like to watch movies and sit at home, and they’re really into their female friends. They’re super feminist. And there was a moment with my older one when he was in high school, when, because he was raised by two women – three women – it was like he was trying to figure out what it was to be a boy. And he watched TV and came to the conclusion, oh, I just need to be an asshole. I understand! I need to be shitty to women, and act like I’m a fucker. And I was like, no! That’s not what it is to be a man!’ The phase went on for six months, she says. Did she let it play out? ‘Yes, and no. I was like, you won’t be talking to me like that.’
Meanwhile, her wife has directed a short documentary called Alok
– a portrait of Alok Vaid-Menon, a non-binary writer and performance
‘The greatest thing is helping communities of other women.’
artist – which premiered at the Sundance Film Festival. Jodie says it makes her very proud. Although she served as executive producer, she and Alexandra are not overly involved in each other’s work. ‘We like doing our work independently, although there are things that I do better, she recognises.’ Sounds ominous. Like what? ‘I’m a really good letter writer. And she’s extraordinarily visual. Great photographer.’
Getting to this place of seeming security and happiness with Alexandra has been a struggle for Jodie. Even minor celebrity is corrosive, and Jodie’s fame is ridiculous. It has taken years of work, she says, not to be ruined by it. ‘There is a meta-weirdness to having been a public figure from the time you were young, right? Especially if you have stayed being an actor.’ It wasn’t until she took time off mid-career that she realised just how odd her life was. Suddenly, ‘I had lots of time where I wasn’t the most important person in the room. Or not everybody was listening to the stupid shit I was ranting about. Being a public figure, your universe is altered and you just don’t know anything else. And you don’t know that you’re a blowhard, and that you’re not a good friend, and that you never show up.’
During the years Jodie was with Cydney, she never took her to the Oscars or other public events, and never publicly acknowledged their relationship – although she did pay tribute to her in her 2013 Golden Globes speech, when, after thanking Cydney, she said, ‘I’m so proud of our modern family.’ What’s the reckoning? I ask. Is it someone telling you they can’t live with you any more because you’re so awful? ‘Yes. Definitely. An actor’s life is not a good life to be self-aware. It’s very easy to be un-self-aware.’
Presumably the magnetic pull back towards being an asshole is strong, although, she says, she has strategies in place. ‘I think, healthily, I created compartments around things. But the compartments are problematic for my relationships.’ She laughs. ‘I don’t want people to know me in this context.’ She indicates the surroundings of the interview. ‘This is just mine. My friends don’t know it; my kids didn’t know what I did for a living till quite late. I never brought them on set.’
‘The point is,’ she says, ‘there’s nothing normal about being a public figure from the time when you were young, and there’s a lot of negotiating around that – to figure out how to be a whole person.’
One thing about Jodie’s acting is that, because of the intelligence she brings, she rarely caves in to cliché. When she won the best actress Oscar for The Silence of the Lambs in 1992, it was for a role that felt like nothing we had seen on screen before. The chemistry between Anthony Hopkins as Hannibal Lecter and Jodie as the trainee FBI agent made the movie, but it was Jodie’s film.
‘There was something unexpected about Clarice – she had power, but was so vulnerable and had that smallness. She wasn’t powerful physically, and it didn’t occur to me there was anything revolutionary about that. You’re playing somebody who could be what we see as a male character – the action guy. But she’s not; she’s Clarice.’
Jodie could be describing herself. The contrast between smallness and power is somehow central to her appeal and is also present in her ability to enforce boundaries off-screen. ‘I’m not a multitasker. I’m a weird focused person. If there’s a spectrum, that’s my spectrum. It doesn’t matter if there are planes going by or if someone is calling my name, if I’m focused on something. I’m really good at going, no, thank you; I’m not doing that.’
At this point in her life, she won’t be made to feel bad about any of it, either. For decades she was chastised in public for doing it wrong and lectured on how she should be doing it. ‘Now,’ she says, ‘I’m like, I’ll do it for my job, and I’m not going to do it for you.’ ❖