Jodie Foster on Her 2013 Golden Globes Speech and Coming Out

There may never have been an awards acceptance speech like Jodie Foster’s.

In 2013, Foster was a veteran of the Oscars and Golden Globes. She’d won two apiece at that point, for her roles in “The Accused” and “The Silence of the Lambs.” But while accepting the Cecil B. DeMille Award that year for lifetime achievement, Foster had some things on her mind. Among them were her dissatisfaction with celebrity culture, her sense that her dignity was being undermined by the media — and, crucially, a gesture toward Cydney Bernard, whom Foster thanked by name and identified as her ex-partner and co-parent. The biggest headline out of the evening wasn’t “Argo” taking Best Drama or Jennifer Lawrence’s “Silver Linings Playbook” speech — it was the notion that, in the midst of a cry for privacy, Foster had, people thought, come out of the closet.

Not so, Foster says. “They were confused!” she says in an interview for this week’s Variety cover. (You can decide for yourself by watching the speech.) This confusion lay in the speech’s weaving, wending contradictions, and its shifts between tones, something Foster purposefully aimed for in telling the story of her life from child stardom to adult disaffection. “It was really important that it be so literary,” Foster says, “because I knew that it would be chopped up, misinterpreted. I wanted there to be a document for 20 years from now, my kids to go back to.” (Today, though, the actress is out, and accepted another Golden Globe in 2021 with her wife, Alexandra Hedison, by her side.)

Here in 2025, we’re closer to the 20-year anniversary of the speech than to the speech itself. As a viewer in the moment, the speech compelled me. In the years since, it has lingered in my mind, so much so that when I published a novel about the inner lives of actresses, I used one of Foster’s closing lines, “I want to be seen; to be understood — deeply; and to be not so very lonely,” as the epigraph. The words seemed spoken from a place of profound isolation, one that Foster told me in our interview was real, and part of an existential crisis.

Her declaration that she was considering leaving acting in major projects behind, for instance, was lost on the audience in its moment, but ended up coming true; before making a return in 2023 and 2024 with “Nyad” and “True Detective: Night Country,” Foster acted in only two films, both tiny, in 10 years. At 50, Foster had been dealing with deep confusion about her place in the industry: “Who am I?” she recalls thinking. “And am I supposed to be like I used to be, except kind of worse? Am I supposed to shoot my face up with stuff and pretend I’m something else? Or am I just supposed to go away?”

She made the last choice. And she did so at a precarious moment for the industry at large, one in which actors were, Foster felt, being encouraged to open up to an uncomfortable degree. Thirteen years after her speech, Foster feels as though her warning to the audience that privacy was vanishing has come true, and is unhappy about it. “It was the beginning of the Kardashians,” she recalls of 2013. “It was Honey Boo Boo bullshit reality TV. This was the first few years where every single actor was starting to embrace the idea that what they were was a model selling perfume.” The changes in the past years incense Foster: “Did we sign a document that said you can scan my face everywhere in the world and then put me on someone else’s body?” she asks, her voice rising. “Did we say yes to fucking trolls invading our life and bullying our children?”

The welfare of kids is sharply felt by Foster, who got her own start as a child actor. In the speech, Foster declares, “I have given everything up there,” she says, referring to the movie screen, “from the time that I was 3 years old. That’s reality show enough, don’t you think?” To me, she insists that her refusal to perform celebrity was a necessary choice: “I had to do it my way. You like me as someone who has my dignity. You can’t strip it away from me and then have me remain the me that I am.” Elliptical and odd, Foster’s speech was, for a time, her closing statement about her fame. All these years later, the issues she was confronting remain, but, satisfied that she had her say, she’s arrived at a place of acceptance.