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April 2024 Issue
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Culture


THE LONELINESS OF JODIE FOSTER

A star since childhood, she spent decades guarding her privacy. On-screen, she’s
always played the solitary woman under pressure. But in a pair of new roles,
she’s revealed a different side of herself.

By Jordan Kisner
Photographs by Daniel Jack Lyons

February 18, 2024
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Jodie Foster has spent much of her career playing the lonely woman under
pressure. A young FBI agent-in-training having an underground tête-à-tête with a
cannibalistic serial killer. A scientist launching into space, solo. A
mild-mannered radio host who becomes a vigilante after strangers assault her and
kill her boyfriend. A mother whose child vanishes in the middle of a
transatlantic flight. A wife whose husband is having a suicidal psychotic break
and will talk to her only through a hand puppet. It’s not a relaxing oeuvre.


EXPLORE THE APRIL 2024 ISSUE

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There are exceptions, of course; Freaky Friday (1976), which Foster made just
after Martin Scorsese’s grisly Taxi Driver, was a family-friendly romp. But her
58 years in film, which began during her preschool days, have been almost
entirely devoted to outsider characters—women who are emotionally isolated,
fighting to be believed, striking out perilously on their own. For a long time,
this was how Foster liked it. She spent many years avoiding roles that involved
too much entanglement with other actors. “I wanted to be the central person,”
she told me recently, as we sat in the quiet back room of a West Village
restaurant. She cracked a smile. “I felt like other people were gonna mess up my
stuff.”



When I call her performances to mind, the image is always of her face, pale and
serious, in the middle of an otherwise empty frame: Clarice Starling staring
down the barrel of Hannibal Lecter’s gaze, or Dr. Ellie Arroway braced inside
her spacecraft in Contact. “I kill people off when I’m in the development
process,” Foster said. “I’m like, Why does she have to have a dad? Why does she
have to be married? ” She has a tendency, she said, to “whittle people away ’til
it’s a solitary journey. I keep finding myself wanting the elegance of that.”

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Jordan Kisner is a contributing writer at The Atlantic and the author of Thin
Places: Essays From In Between.