The TV show Jodie Foster binge-watched every year: “A 48-hour marathon”
There are certain television shows that exit your consciousness as quickly as they enter it, while others build a shrine in it, serving as a source of comfort and inspiration that you keep returning to to pay homage.
Usually, this tends to be an easily rewatchable comedy, like Peep Show or The Office, or perhaps a cosy show full of beloved characters going through dramatic challenges, but all becomes OK with a speech and a hug, like Gilmore Girls or Friends. There’s something so reassuring about being able to go back to these little worlds that remain pickled in the era, perhaps the decade you grew up in (or wished you had).
For many years, Jodie Foster had a habit of annually rewatching an iconic show which doesn’t fit into either of these categories. Due to her upbringing within industry gates from when she was just three years old, exposed to a world of stardom and storylines that weren’t all kid-friendly, her obsession with the sci-fi horror series The Twilight Zone is a revealing pick.
Be it FBI investigator Clarice Sterling in The Silence of the Lambs or a mother huddling with a breakout young Kristen Stewart in Panic Room, Foster has a penchant for stories that illuminate the deepest and darkest facets of human psychology, an imprint left by this off-kilter TV show.
First airing in 1959, Rod Sterling brought the marginalia of reality to the forefront, building us a all-possible world of time travel, doppelgängers, haunted dolls and dystopian beauty concepts. With each episode, audiences would be transported to unsettling landscapes hiding the truth beyond plain sight, paving the way for modern concepts that help meld supernatural horror and science fiction.
She isn’t the only star to love this tropey anthology. People like Stephen King have cited the show as a huge influence, particularly noting how “the horror could be in the Seven Eleven store down the block, or it could be just up the street”. It has also had a lasting impact on cinema, and you can still find episodes regularly repeated on television, their contained storylines enduring across decades.
Foster fell in love with the show and made it a tradition to watch it each year, once telling Empire, “Every single year, it was like a 48-hour marathon; non-stop Twilight Zone. It was my favourite thing.”
These childhood favourites never really leave us, and you can usually draw a parallel between an early movie or TV obsession with something you love as an adult. While Foster has lent herself to every genre under the sun, her love of The Twilight Zone tints her diverse roster of roles that dig into the most thought-provoking depths of existence.
