Why Jodie Foster considered rejecting 'Taxi Driver' role

(Credits: Far Out / Columbia Pictures)

By the time Taxi Driver commenced principal photography in the summer of 1975, Jodie Foster may have only been 12 years old, but she was already a relative veteran with plenty of film and television experience under her belt.

In fact, she’d been on more film sets than Martin Scorsese at that point, with the director making his fifth feature when he cast Foster in what would be his sixth big screen credit. Not only that, but her filmography was also more expansive than that of Robert De Niro, making her the more experienced of the trio by far.

The part of Travis Bickle was the 14th movie of the leading man’s professional career, and he’d never been on television. Foster, meanwhile, had appeared in no less than 28 different TV shows prior to Taxi Driver in addition to her movie outings, putting her head and shoulders above both in terms of nothing but prolificity.

1976 would prove to be a banner year for the young performer, though, with her Academy Award-nominated performance as Iris Steensma in Taxi Driver releasing the same year as both Bugsy Malone and Freaky Friday to establish Foster as the single most talented youngster of her generation.

Not that she rushed into Scorsese’s street-level odyssey without any hesitation, admitting that her background as a Disney starlet and the opinion of those closest to her almost swayed her decision despite the strength of the screenplay and the complex nature of the character.

“When I first read the script I thought, ‘Wow, they’ve got to be kidding!’ It was a great part for a 21‐year‐old, but I couldn’t believe they were offering it to me,” Foster said to The New York Times. “I was the Disney kid. I thought, ‘What would my friends say?’ I could just hear their little snickerings. So I didn’t want to do it.”

The influence of her mother ultimately swayed her decision, which was helped by her status as a fan of Scorsese’s work. “She was a big fan of Martin Scorsese and she wanted me to be in films where I was taken seriously and that were about important topics,” Foster revealed. “That was a great choice on her part.”

The jump from being a child actor to a full-fledged thespian with eyes on longevity is a difficult one to make that’s left countless names behind in its unforgiving wake, but Foster wasn’t one of them. Taxi Driver was just an inkling of what she’d go on to accomplish, with her first Oscar for ‘Best Actress’ in The Accused coming just 12 years later after she continued building a body of work that left no doubt in anyone’s mind that she was here to stay.

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