Jodie Foster may have been nominated at the Academy Awards for portraying a real-life rape survivor in “The Accused” (for which she ultimately won) as well as as a child prostitute in “Taxi Driver,” but now the actress is calling out the overwhelming trend throughout Hollywood history of male screenwriters relying on assault storylines to craft female characters.
Foster told The Hollywood Reporter that she was “always shocked” by how many scripts included a rape backstory for women.
“For most of my career, I was always shocked that so many of the scripts that I read, the entire motivation for the female character was that she’d been traumatized by rape. That seemed to be the only motivation that male screenwriters could come up with for why women did things,” Foster said. “‘She’s kind of in a bad mood, yeah, there’s definitely some rape in her past.’”
Foster speculated that male screenwriters could only “understand” the singular experience of women viewed as victims. The easiest way to victimize a woman is by assaulting them on the page, per Foster.
“Rape or molestation seemed to be the one kind of lurid, big emotional backstory that they could understand in women. And I didn’t take it personally,” she said. “But once I was old enough, I think I did have a responsibility to come in and say, ‘You’re not always going to get the most perfectly fleshed-out female character, but maybe there’s an opportunity for us to work together and create something that way?’”
Foster even recently starred in “True Detective” Season 4 as a police officer investigating crimes against. The actress pointed to how the industry itself has adapted since her half-century in Hollywood, especially when it comes to diversifying both casts and crews for more gender balance.
“I’ve never been as happy as an actor as when I turned 60. There’s just some kind of contentedness about it not being all about me and walking onto a set and saying, ‘How can my experience or whatever my wisdom is, how can it serve you?’” Foster said. “Bringing that to the table, not only is it more fun and more freeing, but it’s also easy. It’s super easy because you’re not filled with anxiety about the things that maybe younger people are filled with anxiety about.”
She added, “Little by little, as women came on to movie sets, it was just this fantastic thing. There would be one other female on set and then there would be two and then maybe three. And that kept growing — except there were never female directors.But there’s this misconception that somehow female actresses are at each other or they don’t like each other or whatever. Even this year, going to the various events [for ‘Nyad’], it always just feels so nice because the women really feel like they want each other to succeed.”
