Jodie Foster is ready for the world to get over its love of superhero movies.
“It’s a phase,” the actress told Elle in a cover story published Thursday. “It’s a phase that’s lasted a little too long for me, but it’s a phase, and I’ve seen so many different phases. Hopefully people will be sick of it soon.”
Foster, who made her screen debut at age 9 in Disney’s 1972 adventure drama Napoleon and Samantha, has indeed witnessed a great number of Hollywood fads. And while she clarified that she does appreciate some entries into the superhero canon, she also told Elle that they don’t touch her as deeply as other films.
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“The good ones—like Iron Man, Black Panther, The Matrix—I marvel at those movies, and I’m swept up in the entertainment of it, but that’s not why I became an actor,” Foster said. “And those movies don’t change my life. Hopefully there’ll be room for everything else.”
This isn’t the first time Foster has voiced her disdain for superhero films. In 2018, she compared their proliferation to fracking.
“Going to the movies has become like a theme park,” Foster told the Radio Times. “Studios making bad content in order to appeal to the masses and shareholders is like fracking—you get the best return right now but you wreck the earth. It’s ruining the viewing habits of the American population and then ultimately the rest of the world. I don’t want to make $200m movies about superheroes.”
Foster joins a growing number of Hollywood stars who’ve voiced their exhaustion with superhero movies and, often, Marvel Studios specifically.
In addition to the genre’s most famous detractor, venerated director Martin Scorsese, A-listers including Jennifer Aniston, Quentin Tarantino, Ridley Scott, and Francis Ford Coppola have dinged the genre. Actors like Christian Bale and Anthony Hopkins, who’ve both appeared in Thor movies, have also spoken dismissively of their experiences.
While Bale told Variety last year that he thought that his Thor: Love and Thunder character, Gorr, was “intriguing,” he also said that acting in front of a green screen was the “definition” of “monotony.”
“Can you differentiate one day from the next? No. Absolutely not. You have no idea what to do,” Bale said. “I couldn’t even differentiate one stage from the next. They kept saying, ‘You’re on Stage Three.’ Well, it’s like, ‘Which one is that?’ ‘The blue one.’ They’re like, ‘Yeah. But you’re on Stage Seven.’ ‘Which one is that?’ ‘The blue one.’ I was like, ‘Uh, where?’”
Hopkins was even blunter in 2021, when he confirmed that he’d written the letters “N.A.R.” on his first Thor script—meaning, “No Acting Required.”
“I try to apply it to everything I do: no acting required,” Hopkins told the New Yorker. “On Thor, you have Chris Hemsworth—who looks like Thor—and a director like Kenneth Branagh, who is so certain of what he wants. They put me in armor; they shoved a beard on me. Sit on the throne; shout a bit. If you’re sitting in front of a green screen, it’s pointless acting it.”
Regardless of what happens to the superhero genre, it seems safe to bet that we won’t see Foster in a Thor movie any time soon. And as for what she’d like to do instead? The actress told Elle that after seeing Everything Everywhere All at Once, she’s eager to work with directors Daniel Kwan and Daniel Scheinert, aka “The Daniels.”
“That’s the film that I will return to over and over again whenever I feel depressed or sad,” Foster said. “I first saw it with one of my sons, and we held hands and pinched each other and cried for 45 minutes afterward. And then I saw it with my other son a week later, and it just opened a portal of connection and understanding and hope. He started telling me everything from his high school that he’d never told me, and we were walking in the rain crying and opening up. And I was like, this is what film can do.”
