The Loneliness of Jodie Foster
Photographs by Daniel Jack Lyons
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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.
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.”
Foster’s long stretch as a woman alone on camera has mirrored, in some sense, her own feeling of loneliness. As a child actor, she realized early on just how punishing celebrity could be. She’s worked hard to protect her personal life. She doesn’t do social media, and she isn’t the face of any products. For decades, she refused to publicly acknowledge her sexuality, even as the media speculated about her relationships with women. “I am a solitary, internal person in an extroverted, external job,” she told The New York Times in 2021. “I don’t think I will ever not feel lonely. It’s a theme in my life.”
In the past year, however, she’s taken on two projects that are not solitary journeys at all. In the latest season of HBO’s True Detective, Foster is half of a twosome; she plays a police chief working a strange case with a younger officer. In development, Foster reversed her usual argument: She insisted to Issa López, the season’s writer and director, that the younger character should have the main arc. In the movie Nyad—for which Foster has been nominated for an Academy Award—she plays Bonnie Stoll, coach and best friend to Annette Bening’s Diana Nyad, the marathon swimmer who famously swam from Cuba to Florida.
is new territory for Foster in several ways. It’s a
