Looking from the outside, Robert Downey Jr. and Jodie Foster have a lot in common. Both of them are actors, were child actors, are married to their longtime spouses and were even nominated at the 2024 Oscars at the same time. But, according to a new interview, the two had almost opposite experiences through the years.
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“What I was thinking about when I was thinking about going to meet up with you is that we started in the same place — as child actors — but we have opposite trajectories,” Foster told Downey in their Variety Actors on Actors interview.RELATED STORYJodie Foster Shares Why Acting in Her 60s Has Defied Everything She Expected From Her Career
“You came to the table with this freedom, and you didn’t have the discipline part necessarily down for a number of years,” Foster said of Downey, who openly struggled with drug addiction in the 80s and 90s. “Then increasingly over time, in your martial-artist way, because you do martial arts, you’ve become this extraordinarily disciplined person that still has the fun and the joy.”
Downey, who was directed by Foster in 1995’s Home for the Holidays, agreed, adding that Foster herself played a role in him getting his act together. “You wrote me a letter once,” Downey remembered. “In it, you talked about Chaplin and his precision. And it turns out it was one of the most prophetic things. You’ve impacted me so greatly.”
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From their conversation, it was clear that the Nyad star remembered the letter, and had reached out to Downey out of concern. After all, Downey admitted he was “pretty out of my mind the whole time we were shooting.”
But, looking back, Foster reflected that there are benefits to being less disciplined too.
“I started out as ‘You just do what people say, and you just follow this path, and these are the goals that I have, and these are the things that I want to do,’” she said. “And I really realized as I got older that, as helpful as that was for my career, it was unfree.”
“When I got older, I learned how to be freer instead of so disciplined,” she said.
So, over time, while they had different journeys to get there, it seems Foster and Downey found a middle ground, both disciplined yet free.
