Jodie Foster has been acting since she was 3, starting out in commercials, then appearing in TV shows and films. She still has scars from the time a lion mauled her on the set of a Disney film when she was 9.

“He picked me up by the hip and shook me,” she says. “I had no idea what was happening. … I remember thinking, ‘Oh this must be an earthquake.’”

Luckily, the lion responded promptly when a trainer said, “Drop it.” It was a scary moment, Foster says, but “the good news is I’m fine … and I’m not afraid of lions.”

“I think there’s a part of me that has been made resilient by what I’ve done for a living and has been able to control my emotions in order to do that in a role,” she says. “When you’re older, those survival skills get in the way, and you have to learn how to ditch them [when] they’re not serving you anymore.”

In 1976, at age 12, Foster starred opposite Robert De Niro and Harvey Keitel in Martin Scorsese’s film Taxi Driver. Foster’s portrayal of a teenage sex worker in the film sparked controversy because of her age, but also led to her first Academy Award nomination. She remains grateful for the experience on the film, which turns 50 this year.

“What luck to have been part of that, our golden age of cinema in the ’70s, some of the greatest movies that America ever made, the greatest filmmakers, auteur films,” she says. “I couldn’t be happier that [my mom] chose these roles for me.”

In the new film Vie Privée (A Private Life), she plays an American Freudian psychoanalyst in Paris. With the exception of a few lines, she speaks French throughout the film.

Interview highlights

On learning to speak French as a child

My mom, when I was about 9 years old, she had never traveled anywhere in her life and right before then, she took a trip to France and fell in love with it and said, “OK, you’re going to learn French. You are going to go to an immersion school, and someday maybe you’ll be a French actor.” And so they dropped me in where [there] was a school, Le Lycée Francais de Los Angeles, that does everything in French, so it was science and math and history, everything in French. And I cried for about six months and then I spoke fluently and got over it.

On being the family breadwinner at a young age

My mom was very aware that that was unusual, and that would put pressure on me. So she kind of sold it differently. She would say, “Well, you do one job, but then your sister does another job. And we all participate, we’re all doing a job, and this is all part of the family.” And I think that was her way of … making my brothers and sisters not feel like somehow they were beholden to me or to my brother who also was an actor. And not having pressure on me, but also helping her ego a bit, because I think that was hard for her to feel that she was being taken care of by a child. …

There’s two things that can happen as a child actor: One is you develop resilience, and you come up with a plan and a way to survive intact, and there are real advantages to that in life. And I really feel grateful for the advantages that that’s given me, the benefits that that has given me. Or the other is you totally fall apart and you can’t take it.

On her early immersion into art and film

My mom saw that I was interested in art and cinema and took me to every foreign film she could find, mostly because she wanted me to hear other languages. But we went to very dark, interesting German films that lasted eight hours long. And we saw all the French New Wave movies, and we had long conversations about movies and what they meant. I think that she respected me.

I did have a skill that was beyond my years and I had a strong sense of self … [and the] ability to understand emotions and character that was beyond my years. [Acting] gave me an outlet that I would not have had if I’d gone on a path to be what I was meant to be, which is really just to be an intellectual. … It was a sink or swim. I had to develop an emotional side. I had to cut off my brain sometimes to play characters in order to be good, and I wanted to be good. If I was gonna do something, I wanted it to be excellent. So in order to do that, I had to learn emotions and I had to learn, not only how to access them, but also how to control them so that I could give them intention.

Jodie Foster attends the Cannes Film Festival in 1976 to promote Taxi Driver.

Raph Gatti/AFP for Getty Images

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Raph Gatti/AFP for Getty Images

On sexual abuse in Hollywood

I’ve really had to examine that, like, how did I get saved? There were microaggressions, of course. Anybody who’s in the workplace has had misogynist microaggressions. That’s just a part of being a woman, right? But what kept me from having those bad experiences, those terrible experiences? And what I came to believe … is that I had a certain amount of power by the time I was, like, 12. So by the time I had my first Oscar nomination, I was part of a different category of people that had power and I was too dangerous to touch. I could’ve ruined people’s careers or I could’ve called “Uncle,” so I wasn’t on the block.

It also might be just my personality, that I am a head-first person and I approach the world in a head-first way. … It’s very difficult to emotionally manipulate me because I don’t operate with my emotions on the surface. Predators use whatever they can in order to manipulate and get people to do what they want them to do. And that’s much easier when the person is younger, when the person is weaker, when a person has no power. That’s precisely what predatory behavior is about: using power in order to diminish people, in order to dominate them.

On her decision to safeguard her personal life

I did not want to participate in celebrity culture. I wanted to make movies that I loved. I wanted to give everything of myself on-screen, and I wanted to survive intact by having a life and not handing that life over to the media and to people that wished me ill. …

What’s important to consider is that I grew up in a different time, where people couldn’t be who they were and we didn’t have the kinds of freedoms that we have now. And I look at my sons’ generation, and bless them, that they have a kind of justice that we just didn’t [have] access to. And I did the best I could and I had a big plan in mind of making films that could make people better. And that’s all I wanted to do was make movies. I didn’t want to be a public figure or a pioneer or any of those things. And I benefited from all of the pioneers that came before me that did that hard work of having tomatoes thrown at them and being unsafe. And they did that work and I have thanked them. I thank them.

We don’t all have to have the same role. And I think my role was making movies that mattered and creating female characters that were human characters and creating a huge body of work and then being able to look back at the pattern of that body of work and go like, “Oh wow, Jodie played a doctor. She played a mother. She played as a scientist. She played an astronaut. She killed all the bad guys. She did all of those things — and had a lesbian wife and had two kids and was a complete person that had a whole other life.” And I think that will be valuable someday down the line, that I was able to keep my life intact and leave a legacy. There’s lots of ways of being valuable.

Lauren Krenzel and Thea Chaloner produced and edited this interview for broadcast. Bridget Bentz, Molly Seavy-Nesper and Beth Novey adapted it for the web.

Hartman was previously (legally) growing cannabis on the ranch. However, when the market became oversaturated, it was no longer profitable to be a small-scale cannabis grower in the Santa Ynez Valley, he said.

Hartman loves growing crops, and his mother mentioned protea, an ancient type of flowering plant found in South Africa and Australia. Protea are drought-tolerant and do well in California’s Mediterranean climate, he said. In the summer, the staff only has to provide a gallon of water to the plants.

Hartman said his family took a “massive gamble” and picked out 16 of the best cultivars that they thought would grow well, planting them in 2020. They’ve found the South African varieties, like the Safari Sunset and Goldstrike, do the best.

“These protea plants go back in the fossil record like 300 million years,” Hartman said. “They’re some of the oldest flowers on the planet.”

Hartman said he plans to open a nursery, hopefully later this year, so people can buy potted protea and plant them around their homes, given how drought-tolerant they are.

The tour through the ranch’s 8 acres of proteas includes a U-pick option where guests can take cut flowers home.

When I first began reviewing television after years of doing film, I was struck by one huge difference between the way they tell stories. Movies work hard to end memorably: They want to stick the landing so we’ll leave the theater satisfied. TV series have no landing to stick. They want to leave us un-satisfied so we’ll tune into the next season.

Oddly enough, this week sees the arrival of sequels to two hit series — Apple TV’s Hijack and Prime Video’s The Night Manager — whose first seasons ended so definitively that I never dreamt there could be another. Goes to show how naïve I am.

The original Hijack, which came out in 2023, starred Idris Elba as Sam Nelson, a corporate negotiator who’s flying to see his ex when the plane is skyjacked by assorted baddies. The story was dopey good fun, with Elba — who’s nobody’s idea of an inconspicuous man — somehow able to move around a packed jetliner and thwart the hijackers. The show literally stuck the landing.

It was hard to see how you could bring back Sam for a second go. I mean, if a man’s hijacked once, that’s happenstance. If it happens twice, well, you’re not going on vacation with a guy like that. Still, Season 2 manages to make Sam’s second hijacking at least vaguely plausible by tying it to the first one. This time out Sam’s on a crowded Berlin subway train whose hijackers will slaughter everyone if their demands aren’t met.

From here, things follow the original formula. You’ve got your grab bag of fellow passengers, Sam’s endangered ex-wife, some untrustworthy bureaucrats, an empathetic woman traffic controller, and so forth. You’ve got your non-stop twists and episode-ending cliffhangers. And of course, you’ve got Elba, a charismatic actor who may be better here than in the original because this plot unleashes his capacity for going to dark, dangerous places.

While more ornately plotted than the original, the show still isn’t about anything more than unleashing adrenaline. I happily watched it for Elba and the shots of snow falling in Berlin. But for a show like this to be thrilling, it has to be as swift as a greyhound. At a drawn-out eight episodes — four hours more than movies like Die Hard and Speed — Hijack 2 is closer to a well-fed basset hound.

Tom Hiddleston plays MI6 agent Jonathan Pine in The Night Manager Season 2.

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Des Willie/Prime

Things move much faster in Season 2 of The Night Manager. The action starts nearly a decade after the 2016 original which starred Tom Hiddleston as Jonathan Pine, a night manager at a luxury Swiss hotel, who gets enlisted by a British intelligence agent — that’s Olivia Colman — to take down the posh arms dealer Richard Roper, played by Hugh Laurie. Equal parts James Bond and John le Carré, who wrote the source novel, the show raced among glossy locations and built to a pleasing conclusion.

So pleasing that Hiddleston is back as Pine, who is now doing surveillance work for MI6 under the name of Alex Goodwin. He learns the existence of Teddy Dos Santos — that’s Diego Calva — a Colombian pretty boy who’s the arms-dealing protégé of Roper. So naturally, Pine defies orders and goes after him, heading to Colombia disguised as a rich, dodgy banker able to fund Teddy’s business.

While David Farr’s script doesn’t equal le Carré in sophistication, this labyrinthine six-episode sequel follows the master’s template. It’s positively bursting with stuff — private eyes and private armies, splashy location shooting in Medellín and Cartagena, jaded lords and honest Colombian judges, homoerotic kisses, duplicities within duplicities, a return from the dead, plus crackerjack performances by Hiddleston, Laurie, Colman, Calva and Hayley Squires as Pine’s sidekick in Colombia. Naturally, there’s a glamorous woman, played by Camila Morrone, who Pine will want to rescue.

As it builds to a teasing climax — yes, there will be a Season 3 — The Night Manager serves up a slew of classic le Carré themes. This is a show about fathers and sons, the corrupt British ruling class, resurgent nationalism and neo-imperialism. Driving the action is what one character dubs “the commercialization of chaos,” in which the powerful smash a society in order to buy up — and profit from — the pieces. If it had come out a year ago, Season 2 might’ve seemed like just another far-fetched thriller set in an exotic location. These days it feels closer to a news flash.