Jodie Foster said in a new interview with NPR that she was “saved” from Hollywood sexual abuse because she earned power in the industry at such a young age. Part of that power came from scoring an Oscar nomination at 12 years old for her role in Martin Scorsese’s “Taxi Driver.” The movie put Foster on a more secure ground in Hollywood compared to other teen actors.
“I’ve really had to examine that, like, how did I get saved? There were microaggressions, of course,” the two-time Oscar winner said. “Anybody who’s in the workplace has had misogynist microaggressions. That’s just a part of being a woman, right? But what kept me from having those bad experiences, those terrible experiences? And what I came to believe … is that I had a certain amount of power by the time I was, like, 12. So by the time I had my first Oscar nomination, I was part of a different category of people that had power and I was too dangerous to touch. I could’ve ruined people’s careers or I could’ve called ‘Uncle,’ so I wasn’t on the block.”
“It also might be just my personality, that I am a head-first person and I approach the world in a head-first way,” Foster continued. “It’s very difficult to emotionally manipulate me because I don’t operate with my emotions on the surface. Predators use whatever they can in order to manipulate and get people to do what they want them to do. And that’s much easier when the person is younger, when the person is weaker, when a person has no power. That’s precisely what predatory behavior is about: using power in order to diminish people, in order to dominate them.”
While she did not personally have to deal with sexual abuse in Hollywood as a teen, Foster would later become a role model for other actors who struggled with sexualization and harassment in the industry. Natalie Portman revealed on an episode of the “Smartless” podcast last year that Foster called her after she heard Portman talk about being sexualized as a child actor.
“I did a speech at a Women’s March about being sexualized as a young actress, and she reached out to me after that, and we talked and it was amazing,” Portman said. “She’s still a role model.”
Similar to Foster, Portman was 11 years old when she got her breakthrough role in “Léon: The Professional.” The Oscar winner said that she learned at a young age to project a tough exterior on film sets to avoid sexualization by potential predators. Portman added that her mom “was with me all the time and made sure that no one got near me” while working as a child actor.
“That kind of projection of seriousness protected me in a way,” she said. “‘Cause I feel like it was almost a warning signal like, ‘Oh, don’t do shit to her.’ Not that anyone ever, you know, deserves it or is asking for it. But I felt like that was my unconscious way of doing it.”