Jodie Foster recently spoke with Elle about her role as Bonnie Stoll in Netflix’s old-fashioned biopic Nyad. Foster’s performance is earning her awards buzz, but don’t expect the veteran actor and filmmaker to parlay that success into an expensive franchise part. As she told the outlet, the current “phase” of big-budget comic book movies doesn’t interest her. However, she did name three “superhero” movies that she considers “the good ones.”
“It’s a phase. 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,” Foster said of the deluge of Marvel and DC properties on screen. “Hopefully, people will be sick of it soon."
The Taxi Driver star continued: “That’s not why I became an actor. Those movies don’t change my life. Hopefully, there’ll be room for everything else.”
However, Foster didn't outrightly dismiss the genre. Unprompted, she listed to Elle three superhero titles she considers to be “the good ones.”
“Iron Man, Black Panther, [and] The Matrix,” Foster rattled off. “I marvel at those movies, and I’m swept up in the entertainment of [them],” she admitted.
The Matrix may seem like an outlier in the group, as it’s not traditionally considered a superhero movie, but it's a prescient choice on Foster’s part. Recent reevaluations of the 1999 sci-fi classic argue that it laid the groundwork for the MCU and “reinvented” the superhero genre.
Even though big-budget superhero movies aren’t her cup of tea, Foster has appeared in a variety of comic-book-inspired action films throughout her career, including Inside Man (2006), Elysium (2013), and Hotel Artemis (2018). However, those movies are much lower budgeted, and frequently much edgier, than traditional franchise fare.
Nyad is currently streaming on Netflix.
