The movie Jodie Foster turned down despite being “begged”
Sometimes, no matter how hard you try, things just don’t work out, because no matter how great the idea is, or the product can be, something will get in the way, and, for one director, that thing was Jodie Foster.
Imagine you’re in the writers’ room working on a long-awaited follow-up to a film that was the childhood favourite of two different generations, with one crowd gathering around the 1970s original, and the younger one obsessed with the 2003 remake, to finally, in 2025, a sequel to both being greenlit, and in an instant, the lightning of an idea strikes.
The idea to bring back an original cast member from the original movie is a genius one to tether the various films together into one neat lineage, which is sure to completely thrill older audiences. It’s foolproof, it’s great, but when the offer was put to that cast member, the walls went up.
Foster starred in the original 1976 body-swap comedy, Freaky Friday, playing a bratty young kid who spends a day swapping lives with her mum, the first to embody the character, based on a 1972 novel.
Since then, there have been a few iterations, but none are as iconic as the 2003 remake, where the roles played by Foster and Barbara Harris were taken on by Lindsey Lohan and Jamie Lee Curtis, who together delivered a huge commercial success which arguably usurped the original. Perhaps that’s the reason why when the directors came calling, Foster turned them away.
In 2025, a sequel to the 2003 movie was launched in the form of Freakier Friday, which brought back Lohan and Curtis in their roles, checking back in with the mother-daughter duo for another adventure, but mostly for a nostalgia trip for audiences that grew up with the movie. Director Nisha Ganatra would be taking it on, and when the idea hit to have Foster do a cameo, it seemed like just the thing to do.
However, the actor refused and refused and refused, with Ganatra admitting to Entertainment Weekly, “We begged her. She’s not going to do it”. Despite pleading with her, it seemed that Foster had no interest in revisiting the franchise that helped make her a young star, not even offering a reason, as the director said she “never found out why” she was so adamantly uninterested.
Instead, she simply had to give up, even though she’d already planned the whole thing out. Even as she pleaded with Foster, offering to switch up the script, claiming, “Honestly, we tried everything. We were like, ‘What about this?'”, the actor did not budge.
Alas, her repeated and firm negation left Lohan and Curtis to revive the franchise all on their own, without what would have been a sweet nod to the original movie that started it all.
