Jodie Foster’s friendship with Mel Gibson has long puzzled movie fans, who see the two-time Academy Award winner as always acting with integrity, professionally and in her personal life.
Gibson, on the other hand, is “problematic,” as Foster herself acknowledged in a new interview this week. Gibson, 65, has won an Oscar for directing and starred in popular and critically acclaimed films, including “Braveheart” and the “Lethal Weapon” buddy cop movies. He more recently received an Oscar nomination for directing the 2016 World War II film “Hacksaw Ridge.”
Gibson also is just as famous for his scandals involving documented ugly behavior. He was ostracized by the industry for about 10 years after he was arrested for a DUI in Malibu in 2006 and unleashed an anti-Semitic rant. That arrest was followed by Gibson being caught on leaked tapes in 2010, screaming the n-word and other racist epithets at his then-girlfriend, Oksana Grigorieva. The Russian singer-songwriter and mother of one of Gibson’s nine children, also alleged he was physically abusive.
In June, Gibson was forced to deny claims from Winona Ryder that she heard him make anti-Semitic and homophobic comments at a Hollywood party.
Throughout these scandals, Foster, 58, has stayed loyal, she told Marc Maron for his WTF podcast.
“Yes, he is a problematic person,” Foster said. “And he is warm and affectionate and loving and a really good friend.”
In addition, Foster said, he’s a “great actor, and a deep, deep person,” saying, “I think that’s probably what’s gotten him into so much trouble in the past.”
Foster, who currently stars in the Guantanamo Bay legal drama “The Mauritanian,” has spent the past 10 years explaining her appreciation for Gibson, although she also told Maron that she absolutely doesn’t condone some of his worst behavior.
Some of Foster’s appreciation for the actor and director stems from her childhood, essentially growing up on movie sets, which mostly were populated by “complicated” men in the cast and crew. The men looked out for her.
“It was just me, and then sometimes a script supervisor and occasionally a makeup artist and sometimes the woman who played my mom,” Foster said. “Otherwise, it was me and a whole bunch of guys … and they were my brothers and dads. And then there were the directors and other actors I’ve worked with. I really like these guys who are complicated guys, and who (are not people) everyone loves. I’m the sister who laughs at their jokes. I just love them.”
Foster told the Hollywood Reporter in 2011 that she was drawn to Gibson’s “dark side” after getting to know him while working on the 1994 film “Maverick.”
“He’s not saintly, and he’s got a big mouth, and he’ll do gross things your nephew would do,” Foster said. “But I knew the minute I met him that I would love him the rest of my life.”
In 2011, Foster was promoting her work with him in “The Beaver,” a film she directed about a depressed, alcoholic middle-aged executive who communicates through a glove puppet. Box office-wise, the film was considered a flop, and Time magazine said it was hard to separate its premise — “a somber, sad domestic drama featuring an alcoholic in acute crisis” — from Gibson’s real life scandals.
Foster told the Hollywood Reporter that she knows Gibson “has troubles, (but) when you love somebody you don’t just walk away from them when they are struggling.”
Foster repeated that sentiment to Maron when he jokingly asked whether she and Gibson “had buried a body together” to explain their continued bond. She explained how she always told her college-aged sons that she would be the first to call the police if they did anything illegal.
“But I’m going to visit you in jail every day,” Foster said. “It’s not that I condone people’s behavior when they are wrong, but I can’t not love my children or my family members (or friends). You don’t abandon people in their worst moment of struggling. Instead, you extend your hand to try to teach them and help them be a better human.”
