Jodie Foster strives to be a mentor to Gen Z, but she still sometimes gets irritated by her younger colleagues.
“They’re really annoying, especially in the workplace. They’re like, ‘Nah, I’m not feeling it today, I’m gonna come in at 10:30 a.m.,'” Foster, 61, told The Guardian in an interview published on Saturday, January 6. “Or, like, in emails, I’ll tell them, ‘This is all grammatically incorrect — did you not check your spelling?’ And they’re like, ‘Why would I do that, isn’t that kind of limiting?'”
She won’t let that deter her from helping the next generation though. The Nyad star — who shares two Gen Z sons, Charles, 25, and Kit, 22, with ex Cydney Bernard — is determined to lend a helping hand to up-and-coming stars. She started acting while she was a toddler, so Foster certainly has experience to draw on. “I do a lot of reaching out to young actresses,” Foster explained. “I’m compelled. Because it was hard growing up.”
One of the actors she cold-called was The Last of Us star Bella Ramsey. Foster specifically chose the nonbinary 20-year-old to introduce her at Elle‘s Women in Hollywood celebration in December 2023.
“I reached out to Bella, because we’d never met, and said, ‘I want you to introduce me at this thing,’ which is a wonderful event about actors and people in the movies, but is also very much a fashion thing. Which means it’s determining who represents us,” Foster recalled. “They’ve got every ethnicity, and I’m like, ‘Yeah, but all the attendees are still wearing heels and eyelashes.’ There are other ways of being a woman, and it’s really important for people to see that. And Bella, who gave the best speech, was wearing the most perfect suit, beautifully tailored, and a middle parting and no makeup.”
While she’d like Gen Z (which includes anyone born between 1997 and 2010) to be a little more diligent about proofreading their emails, Foster’s advice for young actors is typically to chill out.
“They need to learn how to relax, how to not think about it so much, how to come up with something that’s theirs,” Foster said. “I can help them find that, which is so much more fun than being, with all the pressure behind it, the protagonist of the story.”
In between advising young thespians, Foster still stars in prestige projects. She currently headlines the biopic Nyad, an awards season favorite about swimmer Diana Nyad, as well as the highly anticipated next season of HBO’s True Detective.
