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‘I would never have chosen to be an actor,’ says Foster
Shahana YasminWednesday 03 December 2025 06:34 GMTComments
CloseRelated: Jodie Foster reveals why she turned down leading Stars Wars role
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Jodie Foster has talked about her career as an actor, calling it a “cruel job” that she would not have chosen for herself.
Speaking at the Marrakech film festival on Sunday, Foster, who has been acting since she was three, talked about how her career was never a choice she got to make for herself.
“I 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 said.
“It’s actually just a cruel job that was chosen for me as a young person that I don’t remember starting. So right there, it 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.”
Foster made her acting debut in a television commercial for sunscreen in 1965 at the age of three, and continued to get more work in advertising. At the age of six, she made her feature film debut in Napoleon and Samantha, and continued to have smaller roles on television and films, including playing Becky Thatcher in Tom Sawyer (1973).
open image in galleryRobert De Niro and Jodie Foster in the 1976 film ‘Taxi Driver’ (Columbia/Kobal/Shutterstock)In 1976, she was cast as a child prostitute in Martin Scorsese’s Taxi Driver when she was 12 years old, a performance widely considered her breakout role and earned the actor her first Oscar nomination.
Foster has previously talked about the controversial role, and how Scorsese didn’t know how to direct her and needed her costar Robert de Niro to help.
Now 63, Foster was the youngest host in SNL history when she presented the sketch show on 27 November 1976. That record has since been broken by Drew Barrymore, who hosted SNL in 1982 at seven years old.
Foster continued, saying her experiences have made her reach out to “young child actors of this era”.
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“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 True Detective star explained that she was able to survive because of a strict line between her work and personal life.
“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.”
![Jodie Foster opened up about her time working on ‘Taxi Driver,’ and how de Niro, then 32 years old “took [her] under his wing”](https://static.independent.co.uk/2025/11/30/21/48/GettyImages-523069486.jpg)
open image in galleryJodie Foster opened up about her time working on ‘Taxi Driver,’ and how de Niro, then 32 years old “took [her] under his wing” (Getty)Earlier this year, Foster said she still enjoys acting but is picky about her projects and that she wasn’t interested in “acting for the sake of acting.”
“I see a lot of young actors, and I’m not saying I’m jealous, but I don’t understand how they just want to act. They don’t care if the movie’s bad. They don’t care if the dialogue is bad. They don’t care if they’re a grape in a Fruit of the Loom ad,” she said.
“If I never acted again, I wouldn’t really care. I really like to be a vessel for story or cinema. If I could do something else, if I was a writer or a painter or sculptor, that would be good too. But this is the only skill I have.”
Foster is at the festival for her latest film, Rebecca Zlotowski’s French-language comedy thriller A Private Life. The French thriller will see her playing a therapist who becomes convinced that her patient’s suicide is a murder.
The actor also opened up about her time working on Taxi Driver, and how de Niro, then 32 years old, “took [her] under his wing” so the pair could familiarise themselves as co-stars.
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