Jodie Foster has been in her fair share of scary scenes throughout her career. She’s spent skin-crawling time with Anthony Hopkins as Hannibal Lecter and admitted to being afraid of the star, even going so far as to stay away from him between takes. She was nearly mauled by a lion on the set of her very first film Napoleon and Samantha, yet managed to live through it and keep working with the animal. However, it left her with a fear of cats to this day.
Amazingly, though, she doesn’t count either of these as the most terrifying time she’s experienced shooting a scene – that came much later in her career and in a much chillier climate.
When Foster signed up to play Agent Clarice Starling in 1991’s The Silence of the Lambs, she could have had little idea that she was making a vitally important classic that still inspires new creators more than three decades later. In a neat twist of fate, though, Foster wound up starring in one of these projects that owed a significant debt to that tale of a serial killer, an FBI agent, and the genius cannibal psychiatrist supposedly helping her to catch the fiend.
In 2024, Foster was asked by Time magazine if she agreed that her performance as Starling paved the way for an entire wave of female detectives in pop culture. “I just wanted to go on the hero’s journey,” Foster explained. “And the classic hero’s journey was reserved for men. Silence of the Lambs was revolutionary in that it posited that the hero’s journey could be a female journey.” She admitted that she’s loved seeing other female characters enter the genre that can be just as captivating, nuanced, and messy as any male detective – and she even played one herself.
When Foster signed up to play Alaskan police chief Liz Danvers in True Detective: Night Country, she was charmed by the idea that a chain of events started by Silence of the Lambs was finally coming full circle. She called it “the great-grandmother to True Detective season four in some ways,” and added, “Silence inspired Se7en, which inspired True Detective season one, which inspired True Detective season four.”
Foster believes she has an emotional connection to telling this kind of horror-adjacent procedural crime story, and the prospect of shooting in the frozen climate of Reykjavík, Iceland, also appealed to her. She admitted that it was often so cold that the actors struggled to open their mouths, but that simply added to the experience and ensured there were many moments where no acting was required. Indeed, when it came time to shoot a pivotal scene in which Danvers falls through a frozen lake into the icy waters below, Foster once again had to do very little acting. Unfortunately for her, though, that was because the terror she felt was harrowingly real.
Foster confessed during an Actors on Actors conversation that she kept asking creator Issa López and the production team, “How are we going to do it?” but she was repeatedly fobbed off because the fall wasn’t scheduled until the end of the shoot. When it finally got to that fateful day, though, she was placed into a dark, foreboding tank that she estimated was 150 feet deep. Her parka jacket and boots were weighted down, and she couldn’t wear contact lenses, so her vision was practically nil.
The nervous star was then coached by a free diver who taught her how to hold her breath to keep her body sinking into the deep. They assured her, “I’m going to be off to the side. When they say ‘Cut,’ I can swim to you and save you,” but that did little to assuage Foster’s fears. Not being able to see anything around or above her except for a tiny glimmer on the surface of the water made her heart race, and she admitted, “It was panic-inducing.”
Stunningly, the actor, who was only 13 years old when attacked by a lion on-set, was adamant that this was one of the only times where an experience was every bit as bad as she worried it would be. The frightened star stated, in no uncertain terms, “It was actually my worst nightmare.”
