Jodie Foster may have survived a lion mauling and outrun screen killers, but her latest role presented a new kind of terror: a 100-page script in French.
At 63, the double Academy Award winner is entering a new chapter. In Vie Privée (A Private Life), Foster takes on her first starring role en français, playing an American expat therapist in Paris who descends into a shadowy double life as a private detective. Despite being a fluent speaker since the age of nine, Foster admits the linguistic leap was daunting.
“Mostly, I was scared,” Foster tells W Magazine. “What if I said something wrong? In French, my voice is very high because I learned from women who spoke that way. My character has a much more feminine way about her than my usual ‘froggy’ voice.”
The performance, which premiered at the Cannes Film Festival, has been hailed as a career high, with critics noting that Foster’s signature intensity translates perfectly across the Channel.
While Vie Privée features a haunting apparition, Foster remains a pragmatist. “I believe there are energies we don’t know, so why not believe in ghosts?” she muses. Yet, her taste in cinema leans toward the psychological. Despite The Silence of the Lambs being a genre staple, she views it as a thriller. Her true horror picks? Get Out, Nope, and her all-time favourite, Hereditary.
Few actors can claim to have been literally chewed out by their co-stars. Foster recalls a terrifying incident as a child actor: “I was mauled by a lion. He picked me up, shook me around, and moved me horizontally. I had four perfect puncture wounds on my hips.” In a display of the steely grit that would later define her career, she returned to work with the same lion immediately after leaving the hospital.
Though she describes herself as someone who “doesn’t cry in life,” the cinema remains her sanctuary for catharsis. “My place to cry is in the dark,” she admits. “I’m a little ashamed to say that when I saw Ghost, I couldn’t stop.”
Between the “itch” to create and the simple joy of taking out the rubbish at home, Foster continues to balance Hollywood royalty with a remarkably grounded reality, even if she does keep a collection of miniature American football helmets in two different cities.
•Featured images: Jodie Foster/Getty Images
