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Jodie Foster says her late mom inspired her to take on her first French-speaking lead role in A Private Life.
While at the PEOPLE/EW and Shutterstock studio during the Toronto International Film Festival on Monday, Sept. 8, the actress, 62, told PEOPLE, “I’m always finding bits and pieces of my mom in everything I do.”
From a young age, Foster was always fascinated by languages and would practice different accents for fun. She explained that her mom, Evelyn “Brandy” Foster, enrolled her in French school as a child because she had “fantasies about Europe.”
“She had this big idea that I would leave and I would work in France and I would make French movies,” the two-time Academy Award winner says.
Foster recalls watching French films “over and over” with her mother. “She would say to me, ‘Tell me about the plot.’ And then I would have to tell her what happened. She probably knew what happened, but it was like, ‘I want you to work this language thing.’ ”
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While working on A Private Life, Foster said she saw similarities between her character, Lilian Steiner, and her mother: “My mom, when she went to France, became someone new. She walked the streets, and she’d go to Metros, and she’d go to the flea market. And her life had this whole new — she was a whole new character.”
“Much like Lilian, who leaves everything behind to join some fantasy that she has of what it would be to be a French person, which is kind of what the movie is, it’s Paris the way it looked in the old days, and drink little cups of coffee, and her apartment.”
“That was very much like my mom,” Foster says.
Foster’s mother, who managed her career until her 1991 Oscar win for The Silence of the Lambs, died in 2019 at age 90.
When asked how she felt about taking on a French-speaking lead role, Foster admits she was “scared” despite her previous experience doing movies in French. “I’ve just never done anything where I had to talk this much.”
She continued, “Yeah, I was scared. And even when I said yes, I was scared and I kept getting more and more scared before I started,” she says.
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In preparation for her role, Foster said she went to France three weeks before filming began. “[I] didn’t bring anyone I knew and didn’t talk to anybody in English and just had the opportunity to have some immersion, which makes all the difference,” she explained.
A Private Life is a psychological thriller, directed by French director Rebecca Zlotowski, that follows Lilian, an American psychoanalyst in Paris, as she investigates the death of one of her clients.
The movie opens in theaters Jan. 16, 2026.
