Jodie Foster’s Happy People Are Talking About Her Body at 61: ‘I’ve Been Waiting to Be Objectified My Entire Life’
On Jan. 14, Jodie Foster returns to TV when the fourth season of “True Detective,” subtitled “Night Country,” premieres on HBO. The actress celebrated aging in Hollywood and showing off her washboard abs in 2023 cinematic swimming drama “Nyad” as part of a wide-ranging interview with The Guardian.
“I’ve been waiting to be objectified my entire life, so I’m very happy that people have started talking about my body parts,” Foster told the outlet as she discussed both “Nyad,” which costarred Foster and Annette Benning, and her new HBO series.
Foster started acting at the age of 3 and has experience directing herself, giving her a level of experience beyond many of her counterparts on “True Detective.” She generally enjoys working with actors decades younger than her, she said, but added that she felt working with Gen Z… can be a task.
“They’re really annoying, especially in the workplace,” Foster said. “They’re like, ‘Nah, I’m not feeling it today, I’m gonna come in at 10:30 a.m.'”
“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?'” Foster continued.
HBO announced that Foster would join “True Detective” in May 2022. The third season of the show, which starred Mahershala Ali as detective Wayne Hays and Stephen Dorff as his partner Roland West, aired in 2019.
In its newest incarnation, Foster plays Liz Danvers, the chief of police in Ennis, Alaska. She’s joined by boxer Kali Reis in her third role ever. Foster didn’t name names when she told the outlet that younger people in her industry “need to learn how to relax, how to not think about it so much, how to come up with something that’s theirs,” though, and added, “I can help them find that, which is so much more fun than being, with all the pressure behind it, the protagonist of the story.”
Reis isn’t the only person on the “True Detective” set who’s still learning the ropes. Of director Issa López, for whom the series is her first project in the United States, Foster said, “She has directed four movies, and I’ve been in so many films, and I think that part is sometimes daunting.
“But we bonded immediately and laughed through everything. I like it when directors tell me what they want and say things like ‘faster,’ ‘slower,'” Foster added.
The show isn’t the first time that Foster’s worked with a director less experienced than herself. “Nyad” directors Elizabeth Chai Vasarhelyi and Jimmy Chin had only worked in documentary film before taking on the movie, which starred Benning as marathon swimmer Diana Nyad and Foster as her coach and best friend Bonnie Stoll.
Foster took the part because she is friends with both Nyad and Stoll (“I knew them from barbecues and stuff,” she explained), but added that the directors handled much of the movie with enormous care, particularly as it pertained to the topic of Nyad’s sexual assault at the hands of a coach when she was just 14.
“The important thing to Diana and me and Annette was: we cannot think that she achieves the swim because of the molestation,” Foster said. “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.'”
The post Jodie Foster’s Happy People Are Talking About Her Body at 61: ‘I’ve Been Waiting to Be Objectified My Entire Life’ appeared first on TheWrap.
