2024 2/18 朱迪·福斯特的孤独

The Loneliness of Jodie Foster

By Jordan Kisner

The Atlantic

February 18, 2024

A star since childhood, she spent decades guarding her privacy. On-screen, she’s always played the solitary woman under pressure. But in a pair of new roles, she’s revealed a different side of herself.

By

Photographs by Daniel Jack Lyons

Jodie Foster has spent much of her career playing the lonely woman under pressure. A young FBI agent-in-training having an underground tête-à-tête with a cannibalistic serial killer. A scientist launching into space, solo. A mild-mannered radio host who becomes a vigilante after strangers assault her and kill her boyfriend. A mother whose child vanishes in the middle of a transatlantic flight. A wife whose husband is having a suicidal psychotic break and will talk to her only through a hand puppet. It’s not a relaxing oeuvre.

There are exceptions, of course; Freaky Friday (1976), which Foster made just after Martin Scorsese’s grisly Taxi Driver, was a family-friendly romp. But her 58 years in film, which began during her preschool days, have been almost entirely devoted to outsider characters—women who are emotionally isolated, fighting to be believed, striking out perilously on their own. For a long time, this was how Foster liked it. She spent many years avoiding roles that involved too much entanglement with other actors. “I wanted to be the central person,” she told me recently, as we sat in the quiet back room of a West Village restaurant. She cracked a smile. “I felt like other people were gonna mess up my stuff.”

When I call her performances to mind, the image is always of her face, pale and serious, in the middle of an otherwise empty frame: Clarice Starling staring down the barrel of Hannibal Lecter’s gaze, or Dr. Ellie Arroway braced inside her spacecraft in Contact. “I kill people off when I’m in the development process,” Foster said. “I’m like, Why does she have to have a dad? Why does she have to be married?” She has a tendency, she said, to “whittle people away ’til it’s a solitary journey. I keep finding myself wanting the elegance of that.”

Foster’s long stretch as a woman alone on camera has mirrored, in some sense, her own feeling of loneliness. As a child actor, she realized early on just how punishing celebrity could be. She’s worked hard to protect her personal life. She doesn’t do social media, and she isn’t the face of any products. For decades, she refused to publicly acknowledge her sexuality, even as the media speculated about her relationships with women. “I am a solitary, internal person in an extroverted, external job,” she told The New York Times in 2021. “I don’t think I will ever not feel lonely. It’s a theme in my life.”

In the past year, however, she’s taken on two projects that are not solitary journeys at all. In the latest season of HBO’s True Detective, Foster is half of a twosome; she plays a police chief working a strange case with a younger officer. In development, Foster reversed her usual argument: She insisted to Issa López, the season’s writer and director, that the younger character should have the main arc. In the movie Nyad—for which Foster has been nominated for an Academy Award—she plays Bonnie Stoll, coach and best friend to Annette Bening’s Diana Nyad, the marathon swimmer who famously swam from Cuba to Florida.

Nyad is new territory for Foster in several ways. It’s a total sidekick role: Stoll and Nyad are platonic life partners who were once, briefly, lovers. They are completely enmeshed, but Diana is clearly the sun—ambitious, reckless, prone to delusions of grandeur—and Bonnie the moon. Bonnie devotes her life to assisting, caring for, cajoling, and managing Diana. She’s the first out lesbian Foster has ever played. Just as notably, the performance is perhaps the lightest in Foster’s filmography. Her Bonnie is buoyant and loose, tanned and laughing. Where Foster’s performances have so often been tightly held, full of strain, this role is full of ease and humor.

Foster told me that she took the role in Nyad because she wanted to learn something about how to sustain partnership and connection, as Bonnie had. It’s a skill she doesn’t think comes naturally to her, and she’s eager to shake off some of the solitariness that has for so long been part of her self-conception. “For somebody who is interested in privacy,” she told me, “I am obsessed with being understood.” This, she said, has been a “lifetime struggle.”

Foster was a precocious child, exceptionally good at sussing out how to perform in whatever way was desired. She started acting when she was 3 years old; her first role was as a shirtless toddler in a Coppertone commercial. She never had a real choice about it, she says now—she just did what she was asked. Foster was born after her parents divorced. They were living in Los Angeles, and her mother, Brandy, started taking her to auditions. By the time Jodie entered first grade, she was the primary breadwinner, supporting her mother and three older siblings. She told me that Brandy, who managed her acting career until she was in her 20s, would frequently panic about money, a panic directed mostly at Jodie. “I was it. There was no other income besides me,” Foster said.

She was uniformly excellent: an excellent student, an excellent employee, excellent at taking direction. Her savvy, almost world-weary quality made her compelling, even unsettling, as a child actor. When she was 9, Foster was mauled by a lion on set; afterward, she told the story coolly as an entertaining anecdote for the press. In 1975, when she was 12, Scorsese cast her in Taxi Driver as Iris, a runaway who takes up prostitution. Until then, she’d played earnest pip-squeaks in Crest toothpaste ads, husky-voiced prairie kids, philosophical tomboys. Her performance in Taxi Driver was shocking for its sophistication—not because of the movie’s sexual material, which Foster claimed in interviews to be unruffled by (what she disliked was the hot pants and tall heels), but because it is so self-assured, canny, and nuanced. When the film came out, Foster spoke fluent French at foreign press events, though she had to ask for the French word for prostitute; she traded witticisms with Andy Warhol—who offered her a Bloody Mary—in Interview magazine. The role earned her an Academy Award nomination for Best Supporting Actress.

But she also learned to protect certain parts of herself. She told me about being followed around by a documentary crew when she was 13, which she hated but didn’t protest, believing it to be an obligation to her career and family. When the cameramen proposed accompanying her and her friends to Disneyland, though, she went to her mother in tears. Being filmed at an amusement park with her friends seemed like too much—at Disneyland, she just wanted to be a child, unobserved.

Counterintuitively, acting itself felt like a space of privacy and control. Foster remembers being relieved that her mother would stay in the trailer reading magazines while she worked, because the set, and the acting she did there, felt like hers alone. “She couldn’t get inside my body and take that experience from me. She could take a whole bunch of experiences from me, but she couldn’t take one,” Foster told me. “There’s a deliciousness to loneliness … There is nothing like the loneliness of lying in a pool of fake blood at three in the morning in Prospect Park with 175 people around you moving things and whatever—and knowing they will never understand what you’re going through.”

In 1981, when Foster was a freshman at Yale, John Hinckley Jr. attempted to assassinate President Ronald Reagan and confessed that he’d done it to impress Foster, with whom he’d been obsessed since seeing Taxi Driver. The explosion of attention and speculation was traumatizing—death threats were dropped at her dorm-room door; paparazzi combed through her trash. She slipped on ice during a confrontation with a photographer and lay on the street sobbing, while the photographer yelled, “I got her! I got her!”

A year and a half later, Foster wrote an essay for Esquire titled “Why Me?” about the media spectacle that surrounded her. She wrote about desperately wishing to be treated like a normal college kid, and what it felt like to realize, after the assassination attempt, that this would never happen—that she was helpless in the face of strangers’ projections. “Good actors are essentially good liars,” she wrote. “I raise my eyebrows, you think I’m sexy. I dart my eyes, you think I’m smart.” Her tone was both anguished and resigned; if she cared about having the public know her real self, she’d been trained to turn that impulse off. “Being understood is not the most essential thing in life,” she concluded. She was 20.

In 1988, a few years after college, she starred as Sarah Tobias—a woman who is gang-raped and then fights for justice—in The Accused. Foster’s version of Sarah was more defiant and rough-edged than the producers and the director, Jonathan Kaplan, wanted. She couldn’t bring herself to soften the character; what felt truthful to her, she said, was to play Sarah as angry and tough as well as wounded. But after shooting, Foster began to worry that maybe she had done the film a disservice—that she had delivered a victim who was too strident and off-putting. When she saw an early screening, she was so convinced that audiences would hate her performance that she considered applying to graduate programs in African American literature, believing that her acting career was over. But her instincts had been right: Sarah’s toughness, her rage, won Foster an Academy Award.

Then, in 1991, came The Silence of the Lambs. Her mother couldn’t understand why Foster would do a horror movie right after an Oscar win, much less one in which she played second fiddle to the film’s villain, Hannibal Lecter. But Foster was compelled by the role. She saw the story as a gender-flipped version of the mythological hero’s journey, where a young man’s crusade to slay a monster proves his mettle and ultimately transforms him. Clarice Starling became a kind of blueprint for Foster’s future characters in movies such as Contact, Panic Room, and Inside Man: intelligent, alone, duty bound, vulnerable but resolute. In the final scene of The Silence of the Lambs, Clarice pursues a murderer through a dark house and we see her hand, holding a gun, shaking. That touch was Foster’s idea. Clarice’s fear, she thought, needed to be as visible as her grit.

Foster as Clarice Starling in The Silence of the Lambs

During these years, Foster cultivated a reputation for being aloof and self-protective. For a long time, she declined to talk at all about her family or her relationships. She dated women—and raised two sons with her former partner of 15 years, Cydney Bernard—without ever acknowledging Bernard in the press or discussing the question of her sexuality.

Her experience could make her feel defensive of younger actors. In 2012, when Kristen Stewart was in the Twilight franchise and dating her co-star Robert Pattinson, Foster wrote an essay in The Daily Beast condemning the media frenzy around Stewart, who, at 12 years old, had played Foster’s daughter in Panic Room. We “lift up beautiful young people like gods and then pull them down to earth to gaze at their seams,” Foster wrote. “If I were a young actor today,” she continued, “I would quit before I started.” Stewart told me that she was grateful for Foster’s essay. “She saw that I was going through something that needed more words, and I didn’t have them,” Stewart said.

From her late 40s through her 50s, Foster barely did any acting. Partly, she said, this was because she felt she was in an awkward stretch of middle age where she was competing with the audience’s memories of a younger, smoother-skinned version of herself. She’d been swearing off acting intermittently her whole career, insisting that she doesn’t have the right temperament for it: She’s cerebral and introverted, not naturally expressive or emotional. But the 10 years between 2010 and 2020 were the closest she’s come to actual retirement.

Her most significant project during that time was The Beaver, a 2011 film she directed starring Mel Gibson as Walter Black, a man who, despite once having a good job, a nice house, and a loving family, grows so depressed and disgusted with his life that he decides to kill himself. After a failed attempt, he starts living vicariously through a beaver hand puppet, which he animates with an alternate personality: Where Walter is affectless and despondent, the beaver is warm, charming, and driven. Walter is revived and rejoins his life, but he won’t interact as himself—instead, he talks via the beaver, which he refuses to take off his hand.

The film sounds like it might be a broad comedy, but Foster shot it like the bleakest tragedy. The beaver, Foster told me, is “the only way that he can survive when he has to choose between a life sentence or a death sentence. The life sentence is living the horrible life of depression every single day. The death sentence is taking his own life.” The beaver arrives as a survival mechanism that will allow him a way forward, though one he can’t live with forever.

The Beaver bombed in theaters. Shortly before its release, the public learned that Gibson had been accused of physically assaulting his girlfriend—he pleaded guilty to a charge of misdemeanor battery—and had made racist and sexist statements. (Gibson had also been in the news a few years earlier, after making anti-Semitic remarks during an arrest for driving while intoxicated.) Foster refused to renounce him as a friend, insisting that people were more than their worst actions and that she still appreciated the raw and complex performance he’d given in the film. Gibson told me over the phone that he knows that he and Foster are “nothing alike, ideologically and in every other way.” “She’s a mixture of things, and, I mean, I don’t pretend to know exactly what she is,” he said. “She’s an enigma.” Yet he feels unusually close to her. “If she was a novelist, she’d be John Steinbeck,” he added. “She doesn’t waste a word or a thought, and she doesn’t waste time.”

Regardless of its box-office failure, The Beaver meant a lot to Foster. She saw the movie as nearly autobiographical, an allegory of a spiritual crisis she herself had experienced. In the years before The Beaver, she’d found herself in her own deep depression. Her 15-year partnership with Bernard ended; her sons no longer needed as much attention; she was no longer in the spotlight for her work in the same way. A few directing projects she’d fought hard to get started had fallen apart. “I thought I was meant to do great things. And what happens if I don’t do any more great things? Like, do I matter? And what am I supposed to do on Earth? What happens if I’m not great?”

She related to Walter Black—to the despair and self-loathing that led him to seize upon the alternate self the puppet offers, to his unwillingness to relinquish that puppet no matter how much his loved ones beg him to.

“At a certain point, the survival tool, which has kept you safe and just kept you warm, which has kept you with your family, it’s allowed you to exist in the world—you gotta cut that fucking thing off,” she told me, then broke out laughing. “You gotta cut that thing off, because it’s killing you.” The way she spit her consonants here, the hardness of her laugh, surprised me.

I asked what that meant for her. “I assume you weren’t walking around with a puppet—”

“My whole life I’ve had a puppet!” she interrupted.

I asked what she meant.

“I think it’s this persona. And doing the right thing,” she said—getting good grades, taking care of her family, positioning herself to win awards. “And then you get to a certain point and you’re like, This is killing me. This is killing me. I don’t know why it’s killing me now, but I can’t live one minute longer.” For a moment, I wasn’t sure whether she was talking about herself or Walter. “And, you know, I have two terrible choices: I either live a life that I hate every single day of my life, or I die. That’s it. I only have two choices. But then there’s a choice in the middle, which is to change. You have the choice to change.”

For Foster, the change happened gradually, over years. She realized that so much of her persona was a coping mechanism: the bravado of the child who told jokes about being mauled by a lion; the false swagger that led her to tell reporters that she’d been less disturbed by The Accused’s rape scene than the men on set were. “You start realizing things like, Wow, I’m a real blowhard,” she said. “I just talk and talk and talk and talk. Have I been a blowhard this whole time? All these years I’ve been a blowhard, and nobody told me.” She decided that she needed to quit drinking, and joined a 12-step program, which demanded the previously unimaginable practice of exposing herself emotionally (not as a character; as herself) in front of complete strangers. She wondered what it would look like to be a less defended, more honest, weirder version of herself. What would that look like in her close relationships? What would it look like with people she didn’t even know?

“It’s amazing how …” she trailed off, looking momentarily nauseous. “Vulnerability …” She grimaced. “My least favorite word!”

“Vulnerability,” she told me, “is code for ‘women.’ And it’s code for what you’re supposed to bring to screen that’s nice and girly, that everybody wants you to be.” She hates when reviews accuse her of “showing no vulnerability.” “Yeah, I know what that means,” she said, shaking her head. It means, she said, that some women’s vulnerability “just doesn’t look the way you’re used to seeing it.”

In 2013, Foster received the Cecil B. DeMille lifetime-achievement award at the Golden Globes and gave a speech that thrust her into the public eye in a new way. “I just have a sudden urge to say something that I’ve never really been able to air in public,” she said onstage, smiling big but looking nervous. “So, a declaration … Loud and proud, right? So I’m gonna need your support on this. I am … single.” She paused for an audience laugh that only half-arrived. She went on:

I hope that you’re not disappointed that there won’t be a big coming-out speech tonight, because I already did my coming out about a thousand years ago, back in the Stone Age. In those very quaint days when a fragile young girl would open up to trusted friends and family and co-workers, and then gradually, proudly to everyone who knew her, to everyone she actually met.

It was a perfectly Fosterian speech: in its coyness and strange humor, in the way she had prewritten fake ad-libs to satisfy her eternal itch for overpreparedness, in the contrarian way she conceded her sexuality while asserting her right not to have come out in public previously. The response from the LGBTQ community was accordingly confused. Some writers congratulated her; some expressed disappointment that Foster had refused to break her silence about her sexuality until she was old enough to be accepting lifetime-achievement awards; some wondered if she had even broken her silence at all.

Lost in the debate about what she had, or hadn’t, said about her sexuality was a revealing moment that came at the speech’s end. It was a plea for connection, a seemingly complete turnaround for the jaded author of that 1982 Esquire essay, who’d resigned herself to never being fully known. “Jodie Foster was here,” she said onstage. “I still am, and I want to be seen, to be understood, deeply, and to be not so very lonely.”

When I asked Foster about what she’d hoped to convey when accepting the Cecil B. DeMille Award, she seemed amused that her speech had been criticized as a failed coming-out—“that I didn’t do whatever it was that other people wanted me to do for them.” It wasn’t a coming-out speech, she said. Even in this moment of apparent self-exposure, she insisted, her message was about privacy, about the importance of allowing some parts of yourself to be exclusively yours. There, in that speech, lay the central contradiction of Foster’s life—her desire to be seen, but on her own terms; her dueling impulses to connect and be left alone. “From the time I was 3, I’ve given everything on-screen,” she said. “Everything I have to give is up there.”

One sunny December morning, Foster picked me up from a friend’s house in Santa Monica. She told me that she wanted to go get boba tea and buy a new pair of sneakers. I hopped in the passenger seat as she was removing a pair of cloth tubes from her forearms. She laughed and confessed that they were her younger son’s socks; her wife, Alexandra Hedison, whom she married in 2014, had cut holes in them so that Foster could protect her arms from the sun while driving. Her younger son studies chemistry in college; the socks were printed with molecules.

Top: Foster and Annette Bening with the directors Jimmy Chin and Elizabeth Chai Vasarhelyi during the filming of Nyad

Bottom: Foster as Liz Danvers in True Detective (2024). (Kimberley French / Netflix; Michele K. Short / HBO)

Foster, 61, is slight but emphatic, quick with her hands when she talks. She has refused all forms of plastic surgery or other cosmetic alteration (she told me she’d rather have people say “Man, she looks like 20 miles of bad road” than “She hated her face, so she got plastic surgery”); for her role in True Detective, though, Foster agreed to laser the sunspots off her face and arms. She has spent her whole life in Southern California, but her character, Liz Danvers, lives in Alaska. No sunspots for Danvers.

True Detective is Foster’s first foray into prestige television—and her first time back on TV at all in decades. Danvers is a police chief in a remote Alaskan town named Ennis who is investigating the disappearance of eight scientists from a nearby research station. The entire season unfolds in the dark: In Ennis, the sun sets on December 17 and doesn’t rise again for almost two weeks. Danvers is a familiar type for Foster. She’s widowed and angry, half-estranged from her teenage stepdaughter and almost compulsively caustic to the people around her. But as she read the pilot script, Foster found herself more interested in the arc of Danvers’s partner on the case, an Iñupiaq woman named Evangeline Navarro played by Kali Reis. The two are adversaries after falling out over an old case that still haunts Navarro.

In the original script, López, the director, had envisioned Danvers as a softer, more sympathetic main character. Foster fought to make her an unpleasant foil to Navarro. She read the script and thought, “This really needs to be Kali. It really needs to be her journey,” Foster said. Her Danvers is skeptical, brutal, somewhat racist, frequently an obstacle to Navarro’s desire to seek justice for Indigenous women. Foster is the bigger star, but Reis’s character is the hero.

There’s a kind of freedom about her now,” Annette Bening says.

After a lifetime of being solo in the frame, the lonely woman lying in a pool of fake blood, Foster found great satisfaction in playing a supporting role. López told me that Foster turned out to be very adept at it. “If what the other actor needs is for her to look down and disappear,” López said, “she will do that. It’s all about allowing the other one the space they need, because she needs so little.”

Between takes on True Detective, Foster wouldn’t go back to her trailer, opting instead to pop over to a couch on set and check in on her fantasy-football team. This is a passion for her; she spent several minutes enthusiastically explaining her draft picks to me. (Her team had been held back by persistent injuries to the Cincinnati Bengals quarterback Joe Burrow, to whom Foster remained devoted.) She read me jokes from the text chain of the group she plays with—“a bunch of lesbians over 60”—and offered a detailed narrative of the previous 12 months of Aaron Rodgers’s career.

Despite the existential quality of our conversations—the frequency with which doubt, despair, and the threat of meaninglessness came up—Foster is consistently described by the people who work with her as lively and exuberant. “There’s a kind of freedom about her now,” Annette Bening told me. Kristen Stewart mentioned to me that she’d recently seen Nyad and found quite a bit of Foster in her portrayal of Bonnie. “Her energy is so stunning in that movie, and it really is very much like her in real life … That beautiful, comforting, warm quality of, like, ‘We’re just gonna laugh about it’ is something she’s so good at.”

In one of the most memorable scenes in Nyad, Diana is faltering on the brutal swim from Cuba to Florida; she doesn’t know where she is, and she’s stopped moving forward. Bonnie jumps off the support boat into the water and urges Diana forward one stroke at a time, knowing that even if Diana is disoriented and in pain, she’ll swim for her friend. This scene didn’t actually happen. It was written into the film because Foster insisted on capturing the lifelong partnership between the two women. And yet it feels remarkably real—even to Bonnie Stoll herself. “I promise you, I thought it was me. I thought I was watching myself up there,” Stoll told me. “I learned things about myself that I didn’t know from watching her on the screen.”

Bonnie’s arc in Nyad has some of the intensity that is characteristic of Foster’s roles: As she accompanies her best friend through multiple attempts to accomplish something that’s probably impossible, she has to reckon with the fact that helping Diana pursue this dream might mean watching Diana die in the process. Diana is at peace with this; Bonnie is not. Bonnie also wonders whether she’s given herself up too completely to her friend’s quest. “What about my dreams?” she cries at one point. But there’s a breeziness to Foster’s rendition of Bonnie, too—she’s funny, gruff, comfortable with who she is. She loves Diana without reservation. She’s a person with a soulmate. She’s arguably the only person with a soulmate Foster has ever played.

On our way to the sneaker store, Foster told me that, the previous night, she and Hedison had attended an event celebrating Elle’s Women in Hollywood honorees for 2023, of which Foster was one. She’d been looking around the room at the meticulously diverse group of women Elle had chosen to honor, and wondering to herself why she’d been included. “Finally I realized, like, halfway through; I leaned over to Alex and was like”—her voice dropped to a whisper—“I’m the old queer one!”

“How does that feel?” I asked.

Her eyes were bright. “Feels good! I think it feels good.”

A few years ago, a segment of a TV interview Foster did when she was 17 started making the rounds on social media. She was at the time a famous “tomboy,” with a low voice and a habit of wearing suits on the red carpet. For this interview, she’s slouched in a chair wearing an oxford shirt and boot-cut jeans, an ankle crossed over one knee. The interviewer asks her if she has a steady boyfriend. Foster laughs uneasily and says, no, she doesn’t have time and doesn’t think about it much, but the woman presses her: “What kind of fella would you like, really?” There’s a disquiet to the way the teenage Foster grins slightly, cocks one eyebrow, swallows hard. A beat passes as she considers the question, looking down. “Huh,” she says. “I don’t know. I suppose I would like somebody who understood my business.

When that clip resurfaced, young queer people on social media turned it into a meme. The term they coined was gay silence—the choice queer people make to let straight people continue believing that you’re like them, that heterosexuality is the default. Gay silence is awkward and freighted. Gay silence can have an amusement about it. (It looks, for a moment, like Foster is ready to laugh in the interviewer’s face.) It can indicate circumstances of tremendous pain. In all cases, it reveals a protective gap maintained between one’s true self and the persona constructed for public consumption.

The meme-ification of that old clip is a type of hyper-scrutiny that Foster has been subject to her whole life. Ever since she was a kid, people have projected their own narratives onto her, their own beliefs and anxieties and desires. Who knows what Foster actually understood about her sexuality when she was 17? Maybe what we’re seeing in that interview is gay silence, or maybe we’re just seeing a smart kid aware of the ways that an adult is trying to manipulate her into divulging details of her underage romantic life, about which the masses can gossip, speculate, and fantasize. In a sense, it doesn’t matter—the queer people posting about gay silence have chosen to hold up this clip of Foster as proof of forebears, proof that queer kids were artfully ducking questions about their presumed heterosexual future lives back in the ’70s. Foster’s teenage face, hesitating and deflecting, is read as affirmation of their own experience in the world and in history.

Jodie Foster, photographed in Los Angeles in December.

When I watched that clip again after our conversations about her thwarted lifelong desire to be understood, I thought I saw Foster struggling to represent herself in a way that was both honest and circumspect. For a person who wants to be connected to other people, and who cares about truthfully communicating the human experience, maintaining a gap between one’s private and public selves can feel uncomfortable at best and excruciating at worst. Throughout our conversations, even when she was refusing to answer a question, or refusing to answer it on the record, she’d reach out and touch my arm briefly, look me in the eyes, and smile as if to reestablish that, despite the completely unnatural circumstances and the boundaries they required, we could still just be two people, talking.

Her overarching desire, she explained while hunting for a parking spot near the sneaker store, has been to push for rounded, complicated representations of women who get to be the main character of the story. “For the most part, sexuality was really either minor in the characters that I played, or demonstrated how women’s sexuality was weaponized against them.” She let out a little noise, spying what looked like a parking space, and swung the car to the left. “Was it all intentional on my part, picking the way that I picked?” she said. “I’m not sure. But I also knew that I just didn’t want to be reduced to that”—to her identity as a woman, to her sexuality.

Unspoken here was the fact that life for out lesbians in ’90s Hollywood was difficult, often impossible. Lesbians did not get to continue careers as top-earning stars of movies that were about ferocious—and straight—women who emerge victorious. They did not get to have a private life that remained off-limits. “I played the lady who got in the spaceship, and I played the lady who fought back in her court case. And I played the lady who raised the kid on her own who was a genius and who survived the attack and kicked all the asses,” she said. “And I didn’t play ‘the wife of,’ ‘sister of.’”

By this point, we were in the sneaker store, which she’d been coming to for years. The salesclerk said hello and told her he remembered seeing her there shopping for her sons when they were little. She chatted with him congenially for a bit, then we wandered around taking stock. All the best sneaker designs, she told me, were in the men’s section. “See? Girls have lame colors,” she said, taking a sip of boba tea. I looked around for a bright-red colorway we’d just admired.

“Wait, but where are the red ones?”

She gestured over her shoulder, indignant. “There, in the boys’. The boys have bright red. Girls don’t have anything good.” In the end, she bought a pair of black Hokas.

Later that day, as she drove back toward Santa Monica to drop me off, I asked her what being understood means to her. What would it feel like? What would it look like? “Umm,” she said, and then paused to curse herself quietly for having taken Wilshire Boulevard, which is always a mistake. She let a moment pass. “I guess being acknowledged as nuanced and complex. I was A, but I was also B. I was not just one thing.”