There may have never been an acceptance speech like Jodie Foster’s.
In 2013, Foster was an Oscar and Golden Globe veteran. At that point, she had won two awards each for her roles in The Accuser and The Silence of the Lambs. But while receiving the Cecil B. DeMille Award for Lifetime Achievement that year, Foster had a few things on his mind. Among them were her dissatisfaction with celebrity culture, her sense that her dignity was being undermined by the media, and, crucially, her attitude toward Sidney Bernard, whom Foster called and thanked by name and acknowledged as her ex-partner and co-parent. The biggest headline of the night wasn’t that “Argo” won the drama award or Jennifer Lawrence’s “Unique Playbook” speech, but that people thought Foster had come out of the closet amidst cries for privacy.
Not so, Foster says. “They were a mess!” she said in this week’s Variety magazine cover interview. (Watch the speech and judge for yourself.) The confusion lies in the speech’s interweaving contradictions and shifts between tones. This was something Foster purposely aimed at in telling the story of his life, from childhood stardom to adult frustration. “It was very important that it be very literary, because I knew it was going to be mutilated and misunderstood. I wanted to leave a document that kids could look back at 20 years from now,” Foster says. (Today, however, the actress was out and about, with wife Alexandra Hedison by her side, as she accepted another Golden Globe Award in 2021.)
Here in 2025, we are closer to the 20th anniversary of the speech than the speech itself. As a viewer of this moment, that speech was compelling to me. It has stayed with me for many years since, and when I published a novel depicting the inner lives of actresses, I used Foster’s last line as an epigraph: “I want to be seen, I want to be understood, and I don’t want to be so alone.” The words seemed to come from a deep and isolated place, and the words Foster told me in the interview were real and part of an existential crisis.
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For example, her declaration that she was considering quitting appearing in major projects was not communicated to the audience on the spot, but eventually became a reality. Prior to his return in 2023 and 2024 with Nyad and True Detective, Foster appeared in just two films in a decade, both of which were small. Foster, now 50, was deeply confused about her place in the industry. “Who am I?” she remembers thinking. “And should I do what I did before? Should I just slap something in the face and pretend it’s something else, except a little worse? Or should I just walk away?”
She made her final choice. And although she did so at a time of uncertainty for the industry as a whole, Foster felt that actors were being encouraged to open up uncomfortably. Thirteen years after the speech, Foster is frustrated because her warning to the audience that their privacy is disappearing seems to have come true. “That was the beginning of the Kardashians,” she recalls in 2013. “It was a bullshit reality show called Honey Boo Boo. It was the first few years when all the actors started accepting the idea that they were really models selling perfume.” Foster was furious about the changes in recent years. “Did I sign a document that said they could scan my face anywhere in the world and then stick me on someone else’s body?” she asked aloud. “Did we say yes to these fucking trolls who invade our lives and bully our children?”
Foster, who started her career as a child actor, feels strongly about the welfare of children. “Since I was three years old, I’ve given my all,” Foster said during his speech, pointing to the movie screen. “Isn’t that enough of a reality show?” For me, she insists that her refusal to play celebrity was a natural choice: “I had to do it my way. You like me as a human being with my own dignity. You can’t take that away from me and let me be me.” Foster’s elliptical and bizarre speech at one time became the final word of her fame. Years later, the issues she faced are still there, but she is happy that she has been heard and has arrived at a place of acceptance.
