Jodie Foster says she ‘felt like a failure’ when starring in Oscar-winning drama The Accused

‘I felt like a bad actor because I couldn’t make that character more likable,’ said the Oscar-winner

Jodie Foster has opened up about the difficulties she faced while making the 1988 drama The Accused.

For her performance as Sarah Tobias, a young woman who is raped by three men at a bar, Foster won an Academy Award for Best Actress.

Speaking to Marc Maron on the WTF podcast, Foster said: “I don’t have any objectivity about that performance. I felt like a little bit of a failure when I made The Accused, because there were things that the producer and director were trying to encourage me to do differently, and I couldn’t.

“I felt like I really came to understand the character, and I made these decisions about the character that I just couldn’t abandon, even though they asked me to abandon them in order to accomplish some kind of goal they had.”

Foster describes working with producer Stanley Jaffe, whom she said she “really liked”.

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“He exerted a lot of power on the set and he was there every day, and he had a lot of opinions about everything from how mini my miniskirt should be to how I should smoke,” she said. “I was a smoker at the time, and he was not happy with how I smoked [on-camera].

“There was a lot of intervening at the time, because people were worried. They were worried that [the character was] ‘too tough’, or ‘unlikable’. Granted, there was a part of me that worried about that too but I couldn’t do anything any differently.”

Jodie Foster in the Oscar-winning 1988 drama The Accused (Paramount)

Foster, who would also win an Oscar for her leading role in Jonathan Demme’s The Silence of the Lambs, said that she “felt like a bad actor” when she finished production on The Accused, “because I couldn’t make that character more likable for them”.

“[The producers] were worried the character would be offensive to people, and I internalised that.”

The Accused can be streamed now on Now TV.