Jodie Foster admits she never wanted to be an actor and still doesn’t: ‘It’s a cruel job’

Jodie Foster, whose first on screen appearance was in a commercial aged three, has admitted she never would have chosen the ‘cruel’ job of acting if it was her decision.

The 63-year-old reflected on her career at the Marrakesh film festival, lamenting her life’s work as a wrong decision made for her as a child whichshe doesn’t remember signing up to.

Further to this, Jodie is ‘not interested’ in acting ‘for the sake of acting’ and if stranded on a desert island, the last thing she would do is act.

Following Jodie’s first commercial aged three, the star went on to appear in more adverts, and got into sitcoms in the 60s, before landing her first film role aged six.

Aged 12 she went on to appear in Martin Scorsese’s 1976 film Taxi Driver, in which she played a child prostitute.

Reflecting on her younger years as a child star, according to The Guardian Jodie said at the festival she ‘would never have chosen to be an actor, I don’t have the personality of an actor. I’m not somebody that wants to dance on a table and, you know, sing songs for people’.

She added: ‘It’s actually just a cruel job that was chosen for me as a young person that I don’t remember starting.’

Jodie finds herself ‘reaching out to the young child actors of this era. 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? I want to take care of them because I know how dangerous it is’.

The Silence of the Lambs star explained: ‘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 to have this very firm delineation between your private life and your public life.’

The True Detective actress did admit her hesitance to her craft ‘makes my work a little bit different, because I am not interested in acting just for the sake of acting.’

‘If I was on a desert island, I think probably the last thing I would ever do is act. So I was just trying to survive,’ she said.

Jodie reflected that she acted with ease in her most recent movie, French-language film A Private Life, after she attended a French school from the age of three.

‘It’s a part of my personality that I just never get to use, and half my culture,’ she said. 

Opening up about her career in an interview with Metro last year, Jodie – who came out during her Golden Globes speech in 2013 – said she doesn’t resent not having LGBTQ roles to embody like we have today with shows like Heartstopper.

‘More than anything, I was just trying to survive as an actor and a public figure in the 60s and the 70s, 80s, 90s,’ she said.

‘I always believed that the art form, making movies was somehow going to be the solution to everything; it was the one thing that could come out of the screen and grab people and make them hold each other.

‘Maybe that’s just being too optimistic, idealistic, but I really do feel like films have an opportunity to connect people in ways that nothing else ever has. For me as a young person, that’s what I was always looking for. I was always looking for my story.’

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