How Gene Hackman almost cost Jodie Foster an Oscar: “He won’t want me”
In 1989, a desperate Jodie Foster scrambled to convince a director that she was right for the female lead in his new movie, which just happened to be her longtime passion project.
Amazingly, at this point, Foster had just picked up the ‘Best Actress’ Oscar for her towering performance in The Accused, yet director Jonathan Demme still wanted to go another way with the lead role. This frustrated Foster to no end, especially because she had already tried to secure the rights to the novel Demme was adapting long before he became involved, but was rebuked because someone else had already optioned the book. You may have heard of him: Gene Hackman.
Interestingly, Hackman was actually attached to Thomas Harris’ serial killer thriller The Silence of the Lambs before it even hit shelves. Red Dragon, his previous novel starring the decadent, cannibalistic psychiatrist Dr Hannibal Lecter, was turned into the moody noir Manhunter in 1986, and even though it didn’t set the box office on fire, Orion Pictures still made a deal with Hackman to bring the sequel to the screen. The vision was for Hackman to star as Lecter, replacing Brian Cox, and to make his directorial debut with the film, too.
Screenwriter Ted Tally was tasked with adapting the novel, and he did an incredible fucking job. However, when he was halfway through his first draft, the project fell into crisis. Despite signing up in full knowledge that the movie was about an incarcerated cannibal enlisted by a female FBI agent to help her track down a killer who has been skinning young women, Hackman suddenly got cold feet about the horrifying subject matter. From his perspective, he had come to a point in his life where he didn’t want to depict violence on-screen anymore, so in that regard, walking away from The Silence of the Lambs was the only decision that made sense.
While leaving the project was no skin off Hackman’s nose, it did leave Foster in a bit of a pickle. She’d been waiting patiently for Tally to finish his screenplay and for Hackman to begin casting the project, which is when she would make her play to nab the role of Agent Clarice Starling. She had a feeling in her gut that she was destined to play Starling, and she believed in her heart, “it’s really going to be an important movie for me—intellectually, spiritually, and psychologically.”
But when Hackman said see you later, Orion immediately enlisted Demme (Swing Shift) to replace him as director, and Foster was furious.
“I was like, ‘Oh, not Jonathan Demme! He won’t want me. He’ll want someone else,’” Foster told Vanity Fair in 2021. “Which was true. Jonathan got the movie, and he really wanted Michelle Pfeiffer for it.” Demme had worked with Pfieffer on Married to the Mob, and Foster heard rumblings that “they’d had such a good experience working together,” so she knew she now faced an uphill battle to persuade the director to cast her instead.
Still, Foster is a fighter, and she had a recent Oscar win to back up her bona fides, so she took it upon herself to fly to New York to personally tell Demme, “I’d like to be your second choice.” A recent Academy Award winner doing something like that is almost unprecedented, but Foster made an exception for a role she felt so strongly about.
Preposterously, though, her overture to Demme didn’t work. He still tried to cast Pfieffer, who turned it down for the same reason Hackman ran in the opposite direction: it was too dark and gruesome. Demme then turned to Meg Ryan and Laura Dern before Foster was finally awarded the role because of her passion for the material.
Of course, she turned in another Oscar-winning performance, but it all could have gone another way when Hackman abandoned ship and saddled Foster with a director who didn’t immediately see how perfect she was for the part.
