For Jodie Foster, acting is not a profession she actively pursued.
“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,” the famed actress, 63, said during a conversation at the Marrakech Film Festival on Sunday, November 30, per Variety.
“It’s actually just a cruel job that was chosen for me as a young person that I don’t remember starting,” Foster, who first started appearing in commercials at just 3 years old before making her feature film debut at 6, continued. “So right there, it makes my work a little bit different because I am not interested in acting just for the sake of acting. If I was on a desert island, I think probably the last thing I would ever do is act. So I was just trying to survive.”
Foster explained that she finds herself “reaching out to the young child actors of this era” as a result of her own experience.
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“I feel like, wait, where are their parents?” she said. “And why is nobody telling them that they should stop doing so many movies or maybe not be so drunk on the red carpet? I want to take care of them because I know how dangerous it is.”
She continued, “I don’t know why anyone would want to be an actor now, if they knew that in order to be excellent they would have to contend with being robbed of their life in a way. I don’t know how you make sense of that except to have what my mom helped me do, which is to have this very firm delineation between your private life and your public life.”
While acting is not something she picked for herself, Foster said she was always “drawn to very strong characters” and sought only “central” roles in films.
“I didn’t want to be the sister of, the wife of, the daughter of, the girlfriend of. I just wanted the movie to be about me,” she quipped, noting that she was also “reacting to a second wave feminist interest of saying, ‘I want to matter. I want to make movies that matter.’”
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Foster — who is also at the festival to present her latest film, Rebecca Zlotowski’s French film, A Private Life — shared that she’s interested in making more movies in French.
“Of course, because I do feel like it’s a part of my personality that I just never get to use, and half my culture, because I went to a French school,” Foster said. “I love the global family of making films. It feels like they’re the same people wearing the same jeans and complaining about coffee at 3 in the morning. But it also allows me to open up and learn a new culture, too.”
Despite her decades-spanning career, Foster shared that she’s not ready to retire anytime soon.
“I’ll be making films until I die,” she said. “You can’t get rid of me that fast.”
