Jodie Foster has opened up about the impact of John Hinckley Jr.’s assassination attempt on Ronald Reagan, and how it affected her experience doing live theatre.
On March 30, 1981 Hinckley shot the then-President in Washington D.C. in an attempt to impress Foster, who was 18-years-old at the time. Hinckley later stated that the 1976 Martin Scorsese film Taxi Driver, which starred Foster alongside Robert De Niro, partly inspired his act.
Now, in a new interview with The Bikeriders’ Jodie Comer for Interview magazine, Foster opened up about the aftermath of the incident and how it impacted her confidence around doing live theatre.
“I’m finally able to admit that the one bit of theatre I did when I was in college, there was so much trauma involved in it,” shared the Nyad actor.
“Well, just quickly, the play happened in two weekends, and I did the first weekend, and in between the first weekend and the second weekend, John Hinckley shot the president,” she continued.
She explained Hinckley’s fixation on Foster, sharing: “It was a huge moment. It was a long time ago. You probably don’t even know, but he shot him in order to impress me, and he had written letters to me, so it was a big moment in my life.”
Foster described her commitment to the play, which took place while she was studying at Yale University.
“The world fell apart, there were Secret Service people everywhere, I had bodyguards, and I had to be taken to a safe house,” she described.
And I was in the middle of these two weekends of this play, and I had the dumb idea of ‘the show must go on.’ So I was like, ‘I have to do that second weekend.’”
Foster then explained: “There was a guy in the front row, and I had noticed that it was the second night that he’d been there, and I decided to, the whole play, yell, ‘Fuck you motherfucker!’ I just decided that I was going to use this guy.”
“And then the next day, it was revealed that this particular guy had a gun, and he had brought it to the performance, and then he was on the run,” she revealed.
The Silence Of The Lambs star then shared how during a college class, a “bodyguard guy came and threw me onto the ground while I was in the class, which was really embarrassing, because there were only 10 people there.”
Reflecting on the whole ordeal, Foster concluded that it has impacted her ability to take part in live theatre. “It was a traumatic moment,” she said.
“And I’ve never admitted that maybe that has something to do with how I never wanted to do a play again. … It was all part of that. I talked myself into loving theatre and going to theatre, but somehow feeling like I couldn’t make that commitment to ever do it again.”
In other news, Foster recently opened up about why her mum allowed her to play roles in films intended for adult audiences.