Two-time Academy Award-winning actress Jodie Foster said she feels protective over young celebrities navigating Hollywood today.
The 61-year-old star expanded on her thoughts during a recently published interview with Elle magazine for its 2023 Women in Hollywood issue.
“I find myself reaching out to girls who could be my daughters and saying, ‘Wait a minute, you keep doing dumb things on publicity tours. What’s going on with you? This is a little self-sabotage. You know better than that. Who’s letting you do that? And where’s your mom?’” Foster told the outlet.
“I do have this really big soft spot for the young actresses who came up as young people, because I just don’t know how they survive without some mother around the way I had a mom around,” she continued.
Foster said part of the problem with young stars today is their tendency to share too much of themselves with the public.
“To be able to say, ‘You’re overexposed,’ or ‘You’re torturing yourself,’ or ‘You have to have faith in your talent. You can go away for two years and have a life and come back and there will be work for you. Yeah, maybe it won’t be in some franchise, but what do you care? This is your life,’” Foster said.
Foster began her career as a child, working on several Disney films before her breakout role in “Taxi Driver” (1976), earning her the Academy Award for best supporting actress. Foster said she also had trouble adjusting to fame, and it affected her relationships.
“I find myself tapping people on the shoulder and apologizing about who I was when I was in my 20s, saying, ‘I can’t believe I was so self-involved and so unaware of my own privileges,'” she told the outlet.
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“I was a terrible friend because I was busy shooting. Unless you have that time as a regular person, you become stunted in so many ways. I accomplished a lot, but as a person, I was really behind. It’s a hard lesson to learn, because you have to look in the mirror and say, ‘I failed a lot of people, and I wasn’t the person I could have been.’”
Ultimately, Foster is glad she’s now older and wiser.
“I’m okay with sacrificing a certain amount of success or access in order for me to have the life that I want,” she said of her current perspective. “So yeah, my friends have it, and I look over their shoulders, and if it was just the babies and dogs and dancing, it would be amazing. But I know how to take care of myself. And maybe that’s a product of my baggage in the terrible world that I came out of, like my own survival mechanism. But I know what it takes to survive, and I really feel bad for young people.”
The “Silence of the Lambs” star went on to explain how she believes younger people are “building muscles about criticism and they’re becoming inured to it, and somehow surviving a different way” but also thinks “celebrity culture is already toxic.”
“To try to have celebrity culture be a part of the fabric of who we are as people in the world, it’s just really like… why would you do that to yourself?”
