Jodie Foster criticizes frequency of scripts featuring women who have been raped: ‘Always shocked’

Actress in films such as Flight plan (2005), The Silence of the Lambs (1991), Taxi Driver – Taxi Driver (1976) and Nyad (2023), Jodie Foster criticized the frequency of scripts featuring raped women, especially by male screenwriters who incorporated sexual aggression into the female characters’ stories.

During an interview with The Hollywood Reporterthe artist explained how she is “always shocked” by the excessive reliance on sexual aggression as a source of motivation for women’s actions in features written by men.

“For most of my career, I was always shocked by the fact that in many of the scripts I read, the female character’s entire motivation was that she had been traumatized by rape,” he criticized. “That seemed to be the only motivation the male writers could find for why women did things. ‘She’s in a bad mood, yes, there was definitely some rape in the past.'”

“Rape or sexual abuse seemed to be the only kind of dark, emotional story they could understand in women,” he continued. Foster. “And I didn’t take it personally. “But when I was old enough, I got the responsibility to come in and say, ‘You’re not always going to get the most perfectly developed female character, but maybe there’s an opportunity for us to work together and create something like this. ?'”

Next, the actress recognized how, currently, the gender balance in Hollywood is increasingly improving and, throughout her career, she began to have a greater sense of freedom in her roles. “I’ve never been happier as an actress than when I turned 60,” she said. “There’s just some kind of contentment that it’s not all about me and getting on set and saying, ‘How can my experience or whatever my wisdom is, how can this serve you?'”

Bringing this to the table is not only more fun and freeing, but it’s also easy. It’s super easy because you don’t get anxious about things that maybe younger people get anxious about.

“Little by little, as women arrived on film sets, it was a fantastic thing. There would be another woman on set and then there would be two and maybe three,” he recalled. Jodie Foster in the conversation. “And it just kept growing — except there were never any female directors.”