Jodie Foster has had an incredible career that included amazing work both in front of and behind the camera, and multiple Academy Awards, but she hasn’t made it without some scars. Some scars are likely emotional, but she has some real physical scars that she’s carried with her most of her career, when she was attacked by an actual lion as a child.
In a recent conversation with W Magazine, Jodie Foster was asked if she has any scars, and she recounts a story, which she’s spoken of before, where she was grabbed by a lion on the set of the Disney film Napoleon and Samantha when she was a child actor. Foster explained:
Yes, I was mauled by a lion when I was 8 and a half or 9. The lion picked me up, shook me around, moved me horizontally, and then dropped me. I had two perfect punctures in one side and then two perfect punctures in the other, on my hip, but as the years have gone on, and we get bigger, you know, they’re like [points in different directions] they’re totally, who even knows where they are anymore, so they kinda just move around. It wasn’t in the film. It was after the shot was over.
Napoleon and Samantha follows a young boy named Napoleon, played by Johnny Whitaker, who adopts an old lion owned by a clown, alongside his grandfather. After the grandfather passes away, Napoleon runs away, in part to protect the lion, and he brings his friend Samantha, played by Foster, with him.
The film was Foster’s big screen debut and would mark the beginning of a long collaboration with Disney that would go on to include the original Freaky Friday and Candleshoe, the movie that would prevent Foster from taking the role of Princess Leia in Star Wars.
Needless to say, being picked up by the jaws of a lion is high on the list of the most terrifying things I can think of. Maybe the fact that Disney uses computer-generated lions now is really a good thing. Luckily, Foster admits that while she remembers the event, a lot of the details are fuzzy because she went into shock. However, one of the details she does recall is actually kind of hilarious, though maybe not so much at the time. Foster continued:
I was in shock, so I don’t really remember that much. I worked with the lion, so when he picked me up, he picked me up and then moved me sideways and then shook me around. And so as he turned me back toward the camera crew, I saw the whole camera crew run.
According to other reports of the event, the lion that grabbed Foster wasn’t the main lion being used in the film, but a stand-in. Still, Foster showed some pretty impressive early career focus by being willing to go back to work with the same lion after the attack. She said:
Then I guess the trainer said, ‘Drop it,’ and the lion dropped me out of his mouth. I think that was the scariest thing that has happened to me when I was making a movie. After I got out of the hospital, I went back and worked again with the same lion.
Unfortunately, you can’t watch Napoleon & Samantha with a Disney+ subscription if you want to see the result of this wild and dangerous ordeal. The movie is one of far too many older Disney films not available on the platform.
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