Didn't make a career out of playing mother, sister or girlfriend roles, says Jodie Foster

The Hollywood star has had quite a journey, which she says is largely driven by her desire to portray women with agency.

New Delhi: From playing a rookie FBI agent in Silence of the Lambs to a police chief in the new chapter of True Detective series, Hollywood star Jodie Foster has had quite a journey, which she says is largely driven by her desire to portray women with agency.

Foster began her acting career as a child artist who gained prominence in her teens with roles in 1970s films Taxi Driver and Bugsy Malone and cemented her stardom with her Oscar-winning role of a rape survivor in the 1988 movie The Accused.

Within four years, she clinched her career's second best actress Oscar for The Silence of the Lambs for her role as Clarice Starling, an FBI trainee who is hot on the heels of a serial killer and seeks help from a jailed cannibalistic serial killer.

Foster said her current role as Alaskan police chief Liz Danvers in True Detective: Night Country, the fourth chapter of the hit drama that has two women police officers at the helm, is completely different from Clarice, who was a "good student" and without contradictions.

"Clarice and Danvers are pretty different. I don't think Clarice, if she grew up, turned into Danvers. She was on a different path. But I do see the connection there with women that are in an all male dominated culture. There's a certain kind of personality that comes out of that," Foster told PTI in a group interview.

The women she portrays are messy, make mistakes, learn and grow, something that she found in Danvers as well, added the 61-year-old actor.

"I've always played more human characters, the person that stuff happens to, the person that takes action. I didn't really make a career of playing the mother of, sister of, girlfriend of and this is just another extension of that," she said.

"These are women that are taking agency, have power, are complicated and (are) messed up and are not on one path. They grow throughout the show. That arc of change is always very important to me," Foster said.

Created by Issa Lopez, the fourth season of the HBO anthology series True Detective: Night Country is currently streaming on JioCinema.

The six-episode show also features Kali Reis as Evangeline Navarro as they team up to solve the disappearance of eight men from the Tsalal Arctic Research Station.

Though largely shot in Iceland for logistical reasons, the story is set in Alaska's Ennis, amidst the polar night's months-long darkness.

Foster said she probably stayed away from cop roles because she loves to "mix it up" when it comes to her performances, but Silence of the Lambs sort of paved the way for such stories in Hollywood.

Silence of the Lambs is in many ways the godfather, or the great great grandfather of this show. And Issa is really good at talking about this and she says Silence of the Lambs birthed Se7en, which birthed True Detective one, and now we are in season four. I feel like there's a real conduit from one to the other," she explained.

True Detective: Night Country marks Foster's return to the small screen after 1975 but the actor said she hadn't noticed the long gap.

"We look at it as a big, long movie. So for us, it's just a movie, a six-hour movie, and I feel like this show in particular is so cinematic that it's easy to see it that way. I loved True Detective. I was a huge fan and I went back to see it many times actually," she said.

Foster said she felt "incredibly flattered" and "blessed" to be a part of the show and was struck by the contrast between the critically-praised first season and her version.

"It's really the work of our showrunner. HBO approached her. She came up with the opposite of the original True Detective season one. Instead of it being like the hot Louisiana, it's going to be the cold dark Arctic and two women.

"So it really does feel like a completely different universe, but a universe that's very specific, and almost timeless. That has a supernatural element that's just sort of embedded into it. I thought that was a great idea and I was like, 'Yeah, I'm coming'."