Two-time Oscar winner Jodie Foster has been acting in movies since she was 6 years old. Now, the 63-year-old actor is reflecting on her career and the industry. “I don’t know why anyone would want to be an actor now,” she recently told Variety at the Marrakech Film Festival.
Jodie Foster says “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… pic.twitter.com/oEwXWt9P3f
— Variety (@Variety) November 30, 2025
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From an early start in commercials as a toddler, through lightweight TV appearances on classic series like The Andy Griffith Show and Gunsmoke, to films like the original Freaky Friday and Taxi Driver (which came out the same year!), Foster has seen more sides of the industry than most.
It’s a perspective that has Foster “reaching out to the young child actors of this era.” She added, “I want to take care of them because I know how dangerous it is.”
Foster’s Early Success and Painful Life Lessons
In a 2024 interview with Interview Magazine, Foster said of acting, “I just got stuck in it when I was three. I probably would’ve been a lawyer or a college professor. It’s just not my way.”
Foster’s breakout role was as the 12-year-old prostitute Iris in Martin Scorsese’s 1975 film Taxi Driver. In a 2016 interview with W Magazine, Foster noted, “I had probably made way more movies than Robert De Niro and Martin Scorsese at that point. I’d probably made, I don’t know, 10 or 11 movies. So I wasn’t nervous. I think I was too young to be nervous.”
Jodie Foster – YouTube, CBS Sunday Morning
While Foster and De Niro spent many hours together in preparation, the latter always remained in character. Speaking with Variety now, Foster admitted that she found de Niro “really uninteresting.” However, his influence on her was profound. “He finally walked me through improvisation by the time we had our third lunch together, and it opened my eyes to what acting could be,” she said. “And I think from there, everything changed.”
Taxi Driver resulted in Foster’s first Academy Award nomination, and since then she’s gone on to experience the sort of career most actors only dream of. Though one might wonder if her starting very early and having a young, method-acting De Niro as an acting coach, contributed as much to her success as to her jaded attitude toward her profession.
“It’s actually just a cruel job that was chosen for me as a young person that I don’t remember starting,” she told Variety. She later added that, in a way, excellence requires actors being robbed of their lives. “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.”
Jodie Foster speaks in an interview – YouTube, CBS Sunday Morning
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The importance of drawing a clear line between her private life and public life was also impressed upon Foster at a young age. In 1981, when she was just 18, John Hinckley Jr. began stalking her. His fixation on her performance in Taxi Driver ultimately motivated his attempt to assassinate then-President Ronald Reagan.
Looking at today’s up-and-coming young stars, Foster said, “I feel like, wait, where are their parents? And why is nobody telling them that they should stop doing so many movies or maybe not be so drunk on the red carpet?” She knows firsthand how dangerous overexposure and a lack of inhibition can be. The danger is only increased by parasocial relationships crafted by social media.
For herself, navigating the complexities of her life seems to be something with which Foster has made peace. “I’ll be making films until I die,” she said.
Looking Ahead
“I’ve been doing this job for quite a while now,” she said from the stage at the Marrakech Film Festival. “I’m still here, a little older, perhaps more wrinkled, but guided by the same love of telling stories, of bringing characters to life, of asking questions about our connections, our fragilities, our humanity.”
Jodie Foster in Silence of the Lambs – Tubi
But it’s not a path she wants the next generation to follow lightly — if at all.
Do you think Jodie Foster has a healthy perspective? Or is she soured on a career she never wanted? Let us know in the comments!
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Because. The profession has always attracted the queerdos of society. Every fruit. Every woman who wants to be a man (jodie foster is a prime example). Every effeminate man that shied away from sports.
Does anyone remember the kids that were in drama club in school? They were completely irrelevant and highly pissed off at society as a whole for being saddled with irrelevancy.
Where will all these creeps go for a paycheck now?
Politics? HR?