THE ACCUSED

Jodie Foster’s Greatest Role Yet: Playing Mafia Over Zoom With Retirement Home Residents

And sometimes the Academy Award winner pretends to be an Italian man with a bee in his bonnet about ethnic stereotyping, she said.

Between The Silence of the Lambs and the forthcoming season of True Detective, twice-over Academy Award winner Jodie Foster has some experience going toe-to-toe with killers. But during the pandemic she was pitted against her fiercest, most nefarious foe yet: a bunch of assisted living facility residents pretending to be mobsters. Foster told The Hollywood Reporter magazine that she’d gotten into playing the popular party game Mafia with her former Taxi Driver and Silence co-star, Harry Northup, who lives at the Motion Picture and Television Fund’s retirement community in Woodland Hills, California. Foster explained she’d play games with the residents over Zoom. “Sometimes I like to do it in character,” she said. “I have an Italian guy [character] who is really resentful of the fact that everybody thinks he’s Mafia and he thinks it’s profiling. It’s a good acting game. Actors are good liars, aren’t they?”