Chapter 1: What is the main topic discussed in this episode?
From WHYY in Philadelphia, this is Fresh Air Weekend. I'm Tanya Mosley. Today, Jodie Foster. She's been acting since she was three. And when she was nine, she was working on a Disney film with a trained lion who went off script and picked her up in his mouth.
He held me horizontally and then flipped me around and shook me.
Chapter 2: What early experiences shaped Jodie Foster's acting career?
So I watched the entire film crew run in the opposite direction, sideways.
Foster was 12 when she played a child prostitute in Taxi Driver, a role that would define her early career and make her one of the most celebrated actors of her generation. Also, we hear from Tessa Thompson.
Chapter 3: What was Jodie Foster's experience working with a lion as a child actor?
She stars in the new Netflix murder mystery limited series His and Hers. She's built a career on characters in independent films and blockbusters, from Valkyrie in the Marvel Universe to Bianca in the Creed films to the calculating Charlotte in Westworld. That's coming up on Fresh Air Weekend.
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This is Fresh Air Weekend. I'm Tanya Mosley. Terry has today's first interview.
Here she is. My guest is Jodie Foster, and we're going to look back on her life and career, starting with her early days as a child actor and her Oscar-nominated performance in Taxi Driver when she was 12. Next month marks the film's 50th anniversary. She recently received an Oscar nomination for the film Nyad,
an Emmy win for the latest season of the HBO series True Detective, and is now starring in a new French language film, A Private Life. Along the way, Foster won many awards, including Oscars for the films The Accused and The Silence of the Lambs. In a private life, she plays an American Freudian psychoanalyst in Paris, and with the exception of a few lines, she speaks French throughout the film.
When the film begins, everyone is angry with her, including her patients. One of them accuses her of having wasted his time. He's been in therapy with her for years, hoping it would help him quit smoking. It hasn't helped.
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Chapter 4: What challenges did Tessa Thompson face in her career?
So he tried a hypnotist, and after only one session, he quit cigarettes. Foster's character is very skeptical of hypnosis, but when one of her patients, a beautiful woman, dies under mysterious circumstances, Foster's character wants to get to the bottom of what happened, hoping she wasn't in any way responsible.
Despite her skepticism, she sees a hypnotist, goes under, and that sets her on a path to uncover what happened to her patient. Jodi Foster, welcome back to Fresh Air. It's been years, and my impression is your life has changed a lot since then.
I don't know. It's moved on, but, you know, it's the same old me. And I'm always so happy to be on NPR because I'm such an NPR fan and such an NPR head.
That is so great to hear. So your new film is in French, and you went to French language school, right?
Yeah.
Yeah. My mom, when I was about nine years old, she had never traveled anywhere in her life. And she, right before then, she took a trip to France and fell in love with it and said, okay, you're going to learn French, you're going to go to an immersion school, and someday maybe you'll be a French actor.
And so they dropped me in where it was a school, Le Lycée Francais de Los Angeles, that does everything in French. So it was science and math and history, everything in French. And I cried for about six months. And then And then I spoke fluently and got over it.
So hypnosis plays a key role in the new movie. Did you ever go under, even for research?
Well, actually, I have. Yeah, I quit smoking. When I quit smoking, I went to a hypnotist, and I was a really, really big smoker. So I tried everything, and I tried to quit a million times. And, you know, like everybody, I'd get edgy or I'd gain weight or I couldn't sleep. So I went to this guy and, you know, wrote the check for $90 and said, I don't know. He said a few things.
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Chapter 5: How does Tessa Thompson navigate her biracial identity?
It has fluoride. The others we tried didn't. Hey, great. A toothpaste should fight cavities. Crest can't promise everybody results like this, but we can promise most people good checkups. Fighting cavities is the whole idea behind Crest. Hey, George, maybe your game is really tennis.
Ha, ha, ha!
Oh, boy.
The acting is so terrible. Oh, yeah. Well, but that was what you were supposed to do. You were supposed to be terrible. We didn't know. I mean, it just was a different style. You know, it was a different style.
But by which I think you mean it sounds like somebody reading their lines for the first time.
Yes. Yes. And, yeah, I mean, I remember thinking, oh, well, this is not a job I'm going to do when I'm a grown-up because this seems like a very silly job. I just learn lines and then I say them. And somebody usually says to me, the first direction somebody tells me is usually act natural. Or maybe they'll say something like be excited on that line. And that part of it had held no sway for me.
I had no interest in that. The part that was interesting to me was being on set with these families of mostly guys. They really were all these brothers and fathers who – would teach me things, and they'd talk about how the camera worked. And, you know, we would all be freezing together or complaining about the food together. And there was this community of people that I belonged to.
And because I love movies and love television, that was such a big part of my life, I was a part of something. So that's the part that I remember. I don't remember the work particularly as being intriguing.
You were mauled by a lion at age nine. I read that, but what happened? Was this on a shoot?
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Chapter 6: How did Jodie Foster prepare for her role in 'A Private Life'?
And then the next thing I knew it was an earthquake. And then he dropped me and the trainer said, drop it. And the lion was so well-trained that he dropped me. And then as I was rolling down the hill, he came running after me and And then he put his paw on me like, I got this. What do we do next? So, yeah, it was a scary moment. The good news is I'm fine.
I have, you know, some scars that are very delicate and dainty and have moved all over my body because apparently that's what happens when you get older. Your scars move around your body. And I'm not afraid of a lion. In fact, whenever I see a lion, I went to Africa not too long ago and everybody else was terrified.
They were petrified because the lions were so close and they were eating prey and all of this. And I was like, oh, makes me want to go out there and ride on top of them. Did it make you think that acting was unsafe? No, no. Accidents happen. And I think my mom was really smart. I think she, you know, she talked to me and she said, you know, it wasn't the lion's fault. And I understood that.
I went back and worked with the lion. I was in a hospital for, you know, three or four days or something. They determined I was okay. So I went back and I worked with the lion. And I think that was the right thing to do, which is, you know, I was very lucky. And they're animals and we love them. And, you know, we you go through the procedures to make sure that you're safe.
And I worked with lots of other, you know, I worked with camels, I worked with pigs, I worked with lots of other animals. I think she did the right thing, which is just to make sure that I got through it.
I think your mother sometimes exercised like such good judgment in terms of choosing roles for you. Though some people might find that judgment very questionable when it comes to Taxi Driver. But that's one of my very favorite films. It's such a deep psychological study of the characters in it.
Yeah, I couldn't be more grateful to have – I mean, what luck to have been part of that – our golden age of cinema in the 70s, some of the greatest movies that America ever made, the greatest filmmakers, auteur films, that were really talking about our times in ways that – challenging it in ways that had never happened before. So I couldn't be happier that she chose these roles for me.
And a lot of it was – yes, it was a vicarious effort on her part that – You know, she wanted something from me that she couldn't achieve in her life. And what that was was respect, meaning, and to be a part of an art movement, to resist being objectified, and to make films that matter and that would matter to women of the next generation.
And, you know, my mom, who grew up in a pre-feminist time, just didn't, she didn't have those opportunities to be able to play a part in the next role that women were going to play.
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Chapter 7: What is the significance of Tessa Thompson's new series 'His and Hers'?
Take me to that particular piece of dialogue.
So as I said, I would lean on some of my, you know, new friends who worked in the space to go through my copy. But also with that scene as we were developing it, I also asked them, like, what feels right? You know, Anna is someone who is...
newly back or trying to regain her footing in her professional world and meanwhile is having to contend with a lot of choices that she made in her personal life. And so I think you get to see her in this moment. She's someone that deflects a lot and is probably projecting onto Richard, but really she is really talking about herself.
If you're just joining us, my guest is actor Tessa Thompson. She stars in the new Netflix murder mystery series, His and Hers. We'll hear more of our conversation after a short break. I'm Tanya Mosley, and this is Fresh Air Weekend. Let's get back to my interview with Tessa Thompson. She's starring in the new limited series His and Hers, a true crime thriller on Netflix.
Over the last decade, Tessa Thompson has built a career spanning blockbuster films, television, and independent cinema. She's known for her roles in Dear White People, Creed, Thor Ragnarok, and other Marvel movies, Sorry to Bother You, and Passing. She began her career in theater before moving into television and film.
She starred in Nia DaCosta's feature debut, Little Woods, and has continued to collaborate with her on subsequent projects, including DaCosta's Hedda, an interpretation of Henrik Ibsen's classic play, Hedda Gabler. Your first TV role before Veronica Mars, because people talk about Veronica Mars as your breakthrough role. Yeah.
But before any of that, you were a lesbian bootlegger from the 1930s on the show Cold Case.
This is beginning to feel like a theme, just like a period lesbian, just a lesbian of the past, a lesbian of a bygone era. Well, gosh, you were so young. I was so young.
And I thought, what a hell of a way to start. Yeah. Where does that actually come from, though? You know, you go out and you audition or whoever represents you says, oh, there here's a role for you to go to to audition for. But like this is a pretty specific role to say, like, I want to go for this, you know?
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