The actress/director plays an aggressive, foul-mouthed policewoman in the fourth season of the Prime Video TV show ‘True Detective.’

Jodie Foster, in Paris, February 12, 2024. RICHARD DUMAS/VU’ FOR LE MONDE

She may have made very few films in the last decade – her last film as a director, Money Monster, dates back to 2016, and her on-screen appearances can be counted on one hand – but Jodie Foster has always remained in view. The advantage of having started out at the age of 3, of having acted in Taxi Driver (1976) and in The Silence of the Lambs (1991), in Contact (1997) and Inside Man (2006), of having been nominated for an Oscar for the first time in 1977, is that we’re not surprised to see her omnipresent and celebrated once again. First in Nyad (on Netflix), where she forms an irresistible duo with Annette Bening, and now as an insufferable, aggressive, rude, racist polar policewoman in the fourth season of the True Detective series, which concludes on Monday, February 19. While in Paris, she doesn’t hesitate to practice the bilingualism she acquired as a student at the Lycée Français de Los Angeles.

Can you talk about your first meeting with Issa Lopez, the creator and director of the fourth season of True Detective?

I’d read the script and thought it was really wonderful, although there were things I wanted to discuss and, potentially, change.

What was your counter-proposal?

First of all, I’m 60 and, in the script, my character was 40, having just lost her son. She was someone less mature, who hadn’t been a policewoman for that long. Then I wanted the central character to be Kali [Reis, who plays the partner to Foster’s character Liz Danvers], to be someone with a native voice. I did a bit of reverse engineering so that my character would be present alongside her on the journey that Navarro [the young Inuit policewoman played by Reis] takes in the film. My character is tough, she doesn’t have the spiritual side of her colleague, but she does have a racist side, even if it’s unconscious.