Jodie Foster Avoided Theater Roles After Her Stalker Shot President Ronald Reagan

Sitting down with fellow “Jodie” Jodie Comer for Interview Magazine, Comer asked Foster if she would do theater. The question prompted the two-time Academy Award-winning actress to recall her first and last experience on stage.

“I don’t know. I’m finally able to admit that the one bit of theater I did when I was in college, there was so much trauma involved in it, well, just quickly, the play happened in two weekends, and I did the first weekend, and in between the first weekend and the second weekend, John Hinckley shot the president,” Foster began to explain.

John Hinckley Jr. admitted during his trial that he became obsessed with Foster after seeing her in Taxi Driver. He moved to Connecticut and tried to gain Foster’s attention by writing her letters and poems before plotting to kill the president to impress her. He called his assassination attempt ”the greatest love offering in the history of the world.”

“It was a long time ago. You probably don’t even know, but he shot him in order to impress me, and he had written letters to me, so it was a big moment in my life,” the 61-year-old actress continued, explaining how her whole world changed following that moment and she was even assigned security guards.

“I had to be taken to a safe house, and I was in the middle of these two weekends of this play, and I had the dumb idea of ‘the show must go on.’ So I was like, ‘I have to do that second weekend,'” she added.

However, when Foster went on stage, she locked eyes with the wrong person in the audience during her performance.

“There was a guy in the front row, and I had noticed that it was the second night that he’d been there, and I decided to, the whole play, yell, ‘F–k you, motherf–ker!’ I just decided that I was going to use this guy,” she recalled. “And then the next day, it was revealed that this particular guy had a gun, and he had brought it to the performance, and then he was on the run, and I was in a class, and the bodyguard guy came and threw me onto the ground while I was in the class, which was really embarrassing, because there were only 10 people there.”

Foster than admitted how “traumatic” the whole moment was for her before adding, “I’ve never admitted that maybe that has something to do with how I never wanted to do a play again.”

Despite the actor having a plethora of awards and nominations to her name, she also claimed she was “not naturally” an actor.

“I just got stuck in it when I was three. I probably would’ve been a lawyer or a college professor. It’s just not my way. So I loved the technical sides of filmmaking, but I never fell in love with the acting part. It was against my nature, and I think has made me a richer person because of it,” Foster told Comer.