Jodie Foster Like You’ve Never Seen (or Heard) Her Before

From The Accused to The Silence of the Lambs, Jodie Foster built her career on strength, intelligence and control. Now, with Rebecca Zlotowski’s A Private Life, the two-time Oscar winner is stepping into new territory. Speaking onscreen in French for the first time in a leading role, she uncovers a different side of herself — fragile, funny and unexpectedly vulnerable.

The film, which premiered in Cannes and heads to Toronto, follows Foster as Dr. Lilian Steiner, an American psychoanalyst in Paris whose patient dies under mysterious circumstances. The death sets off a chain of events that forces Lilian to revisit her fractured family life and complicated bond with her ex-husband.

“It took me a long time to find the right project,” Foster says. “I just really wanted to make a French movie. And this script is really good for me. It honors the French tradition where the goals are internal and kind of small, and yet there’s so much cinema in it. And it has momentum, the momentum that we like as Americans: narrative momentum where things happen and there are twists.”

Under Zlotowski’s guidance, A Private Life caroms from sexy romantic comedy to Hitchcockian mystery to zany amateur-sleuth caper, with Freudian psychology always lurking beneath.

“It’s something we don’t allow ourselves to do in the United States,” says Foster, “where a film has to be a thriller, or it has to be a comedy, or it has to be a small, personal film. But here [in France], the directors are king, so they can do whatever they want as long as they do it under the budget they’ve been given.”

For Foster, the biggest surprise was what a script in French did to her acting. “I have a different personality because I’m not as confident,” she notes. “I have a much softer performance style as a French person. And it brings something to the character — that she’s filled with anxiety, that she’s not being listened to, is not being heard. And my voice is different; my voice in French is much higher than it is in English.”

The result is a performance that feels far removed from the tough, composed characters that defined Foster’s career: the rape survivor who takes on the justice system in The Accused, the young FBI trainee hunting a serial killer in The Silence of the Lambs, the single mother fending off intruders in Panic Room. Even in lighter fare, she projects a cool, unshakable intelligence.

In A Private Life, she falters. Her son in the film deliberately refuses to speak English with her, using language as a weapon. “So he can dominate her, you know? So he’s always funnier, and he can interrupt her and fluster her,” Foster says. “Usually I play unflusterable characters — something different about that.”

That vulnerability crystallizes in her scenes opposite French screen legend Daniel Auteuil, who plays her ex-husband, Gabriel. “I never met him, and it was like the perfect match,” Foster says. “He’s the perfect foil for Lilian Steiner because he’s kind of soft and funny and doesn’t take himself seriously. But he evolved. The original character was not really drawn that way. It was really casting Daniel that made Rebecca consider the character differently and us coming together in the way we do.”

The culmination comes late in the story in a rain-soaked car ride when Lilian finally asks the question she’s avoided for years. “There was that moment where we’re sitting in the car and they’re smoking a cigarette, and it’s raining and they can’t go anywhere, and just out of nowhere, she says, ‘So why’d you leave me? The truth this time.’ That’s something that, for me, felt very moving, that after 15 years of being divorced and everything that you’ve been through — that suddenly you get to that moment in a car where you’re adult enough to ask that question. For me, that’s the goal of the whole movie.”

If A Private Life feels like new terrain, it also connects to long-running themes in Foster’s career: She has specialized in women under pressure, fighting to be heard. “I think my whole life I’ve compartmentalized — it was a survival mechanism as a child actor,” she says. “I had to juggle, to be in the moment and outside the moment at the same time. That’s what made my work different.”

That resilience was born early. Her first trip to Cannes in 1976 with Taxi Driver coincided with personal heartbreak — just before leaving for France, her dog died in a freak accident. On the flight over, she convinced herself she had made a terrible bargain, giving up what she loved most in exchange for her future in film. “I made up this thing in my mind that I had to lose the thing that I loved the most in order to do some Mephistopheles deal with the devil in order to have the career I wanted,” she says. “That’s what I brought to Cannes. When I think of seeing my shiny, happy, smiley face, working the ceremony and the press conference — that’s what I was going through.”

That instinct to compartmentalize was reinforced in 1981, when, as a freshman at Yale, she was thrust into an international spotlight after John Hinckley Jr. attempted to assassinate President Ronald Reagan and confessed he’d done it to impress her, having become obsessed with the actress after seeing Taxi Driver. The explosion of attention was traumatizing — death threats slipped under her dorm room door, paparazzi combed through her trash, and she was forced off campus with round-the-clock security. “For me, it’s life-or-death,” she says. “I have to compartmentalize in order to survive. But the real gift of acting is that it lets me investigate an emotional life in ways I might not be capable of as a person.”

At 61, Foster admits she is still surprising herself. After years of taking fewer roles, she has had something of a renaissance. In 2023’s Nyad, she played Bonnie Stoll, the coach and confidant of swimmer Diana Nyad, earning her first Oscar nomination in nearly three decades. In last year’s True Detective: Night Country, she headlined a hit HBO show and won her first Emmy.

“I feel freer now,” she says. “For so long, I was obsessed with being taken seriously, with carrying the whole film on my shoulders. The last few things I’ve done have had so much more humor. I don’t know what I was protecting before.”

For an actress long defined by her composure, A Private Life is something else entirely — a discovery, en Français, of her own vulnerability.

“I’m always surprised and then amazed that I can have done this for so many years — almost 60 years — and I just keep discovering,” she says. “I definitely want to work in France again. It feels like such an escape from myself, you know? It’s nice.”