Actress Jodie Foster says she sees the $1.4 billion success of the 2023 film Barbie as a sign that the sexist forces in Hollywood no longer see women “as a risk.”
“I’ve had the beauty of being able to be in the business since the ’60s, ’70s, ’80s, ’90s and so on,” Foster told Variety. “The progression or bettering of our audiences translates into a kind of new thinking about who our marginalized voices are.”
“In the old days, they saw women as a risk,” the Silence of the Lambs star continued. “Not sure why they saw us as a risk — 50 percent of the population! That thinking has changed now.”
Foster went on to say that the success of Barbie, specifically, has made the entertainment industry no longer view women as a “risk.”
“With a big success like Barbie, they gave [director] Greta Gerwig, who had made two mostly independent films, they gave her the keys to the kingdom and said, ‘We’re going to give you our most important child’ and all the money to support it,” she said.
“That’s new for women. I hope that continues,” Foster added.
Elsewhere in the interview, the Taxi Driver actress said, “This year we saw a lot of representation, which is important but it’s not enough just to see faces.”
“For Native Americans, for example, we saw a lot of representation but not a lot of centered stories,” Foster claimed. “The person telling the story wasn’t the point of view.”
“My show True Detective takes us to the next level of talking about Native issues from a Native perspective,” the actress added.
Foster is currently starring in the fourth season of HBO’s True Detective, titled, True Detective: Night Country. The actress stars opposite actor Kali Reis in a murder mystery that focuses on an Indigenous woman from Alaska.
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