Jodie Foster has revealed one of her most memorable film roles was initially written for a man – with Sean Penn being teed up for the part before she joined the project.
Released in 2005, Flightplan sees Foster’s character Kyle lose her daughter on a plane, but is initially told the girl was never on board the aircraft in the first place.
In a new interview, Foster reveals the film was written for a male lead, before she pointed out how gender swapping the lead role would make it a “better movie”.
The 63-year-old told The i Paper: “You know, it was written for a man. Sean Penn was going to play it, and for whatever reason, he didn’t end up doing it.
“And I got a hold of the script and I said, ‘Well you could make it a woman and I think it would be a better movie, because it’ll talk about female hysteria.’
“No guy is confused about whether he’s imagined something or not. Like, that’s not gonna happen.”
By the end of Flightplan, it’s revealed that Kyle was right all along – her daughter was on the plane and had been kidnapped as part of an extortion plot.
Foster said of the ending: “The daughter wakes up and she says, ‘Are we there yet?’ And I was just like, this is the story of every woman’s life. I dealt with the bad guy. I got hit in the face. And then the kid wakes up and says, ‘Hey, are we there yet?’.”
“I feel proud of my part,” she said. “I feel proud of the arc of a woman who isn’t believed.”
Foster is currently promoting her new film A Private Life. Directed by Rebecca Zlotowski, the mystery thriller sees the star in her first fully French-speaking role as Lilian Steiner, a Parisian psychiatrist who suspects one of her patient’s supposed suicides was actually a murder.
Foster began her career in the entertainment industry when she was just three years old, and at the age of 12 landed a part in the Martin Scorsese film Taxi Driver, playing a child sex worker in the 1976 movie.
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At Tribeca Film Festival earlier this year, Foster reunited with Scorsese to reflect on the project, telling the director: “It felt important but also whimsical.
“I was just lucky to be there… I saw Mean Streets [when] I was a kid,” she continued, referring to Scorsese’s 1973 crime drama starring Robert De Niro. “That was it, I just wanted to be a part of this.”