Casualty of Fame: How Jodie Foster nearly died making her very first movie
There’s an argument to be made that Jodie Foster might be the single best role model in the history of Hollywood. A status perhaps dinged a little by how much she supported Mel Gibson, but other than that, it’s basically perfect.
You start out as one of the most acclaimed child actors of all time. You parley that into a scene-stealing, Academy Award-nominated supporting turn in one of the greatest films ever made. You weather the storm of someone literally trying to kill a president to get your attention by going to Yale and getting your degree. Then you effortlessly transition into adulthood with two Academy Awards for ‘Best Actress’, parley that success into writing and directing your own films, then after the first wobble of your entire career, make a dazzling comeback by becoming the most bankable star of thrillers around.
A feat even more incredible when you consider that she was a woman in her mid-40s, Hollywood has no interest in women past the age of 30. Today, Foster has more than earned the right to do whatever the hell she pleases. Whether that’s directing, writing, or acting in film and TV, Foster can (and does) do it all. Not everything hits, but that’s the sign of someone creating for the sake of creating, rather than someone cunningly and strategically playing the market for the next hit.
Anyone looking into being an actor would be lucky to have a tenth of the career Jodie Foster had. However, did you know that she’s not just lucky to have it because of her success, she’s lucky to have it because of a near miss with death she had at the tender age of nine? A near miss that came to her on a movie set no less, and one that, in hindsight, was one so easily avoidable.
After all, you can not put nine-year-old children next to literal, fully-grown lions.
How did Jodie Foster nearly get killed by a lion?
By nine, Foster was already an acting veteran, having got her start at the age of three. However, as with most child actors, her screen credits were all on the small screen.
She was a TV stalwart until 1972, when she was cast in the Disney picture Napoleon and Samantha, where she plays a girl who befriends a boy and his pet lion. That’s right, this whole brush with death came during her very first movie credits. It’s a miracle she ever went back to the big screen.
The best account of this comes from an incredible interview Foster did for, um, Interview Magazine, in 1976. None other than Andy Warhol talks to a 14-year-old Foster fresh off Taxi Driver about her fame and her decade-plus career so far. Warhol discusses an accident he once saw at a circus where a person got bitten by a lion (it makes sense in context), and Foster casually mentions that she could relate. Warhol, thunderstruck, demands to know more.
Foster says, “This was on my second film. There were two lions—one who was a stand-in, named Zambo, and another one who was 25 years old, named Major, who had all his teeth out and couldn’t do anything. It was really hot, like four o’clock in the afternoon, and you’re not supposed to work lions after three. And Major wouldn’t do it so they got Zambo to do it. Finally we got the shot”.
Adding, “I was walking up the hill and the lion was behind me, being pulled by a piano wire—that was the only way they could get him to go. And I wasn’t walking fast enough. He came around and bit me.”
Hilariously, Warhol immediately asks who paid the hospital bills. Foster, funnier at 14 than most ever get, simply responds, “They’re still sending me bills. I always send them back to Walt Disney.”
Quite reasonably, Foster figured that if she could get through that at nine, she could get through anything. Foster has spent the next five decades proving herself absolutely right.