Ask Jodie Foster about the best hotel she’s stayed in, and you’d expect the answer to be something five-star.
She has, after all, been at the top of the Hollywood ladder for decades, with all the luxury that brings. But the one hotel she’ll never forget was in Slough. And it was a Holiday Inn.
‘I grew up in hotels,’ she says, when we meet in Los Angeles. ‘Because I made movies my whole life, my mother and I would be on location and staying in hotels for months.
‘We’d do our laundry and hang it up in the room to dry, and we’d buy food at the market, and leave it outside in the cold because we didn’t have a fridge there.
‘I loved hotels. Still do. But my fondest hotel memory was when I was 12 and making Bugsy Malone. All of the actors were kids and there weren’t many Americans, and we stayed at the Holiday Inn in Slough.
Jodie Foster, 55, revealed what sparked her interest in starring in new action thriller Hotel Artemis as The Nurse
‘You know Slough. It’s next to Heathrow, it’s not a pretty place. The hotel smelled of chlorine but they had ping-pong, and I’ve never had so much fun in my life!’
We are on the subject of hotels because Jodie’s new film is called Hotel Artemis – though the establishment of the title offers much more than accommodation.
The action thriller is set in a near-future Los Angeles, torn by riots, and Jodie plays The Nurse, who runs a top-secret hospital for criminals.
The Artemis comes under attack as the patients battle over diamonds stolen from The Wolf King (a drug overlord played by Jeff Goldblum), and The Nurse is caught up in the violence.
Jodie’s character is a defiantly frumpy figure; her bushy grey hair held in place by an old-fashioned hairgrip, her brow furrowed, her face free of make-up, grey with fatigue, and showing every day of the actress’s 55 years.
‘I’d love to say the prosthetics took hours, but they didn’t!’ she says cheerfully. ‘I did have some help. I had a fat pad on my chest.
‘I had yellow teeth and a grey wig. And I had the most amazing make-up artist, Lois Burwell, who hand-painted every element of my face.
‘I didn’t want people distracted by obvious old-age make-up where you can see the seams. I wanted a real transformation to honour the kind of life my character has lived.’
And what of her Hollywood image? ‘I feel no pressure to look glamorous,’ she says. ‘It’s not my personality. I take my job very seriously, but that’s not me.
‘I didn’t make a career off my looks – I was never the ingénue or the girlfriend, I was just an actor.’
Jodie (pictured as The Nurse with The Wolf King) claims it often takes her years to find a role that she’s really interested in and says she was attracted to the setting of Hotel Artemis
Jodie has been in show business since she debuted aged three in a TV advert for Coppertone sunscreen, working through her first decade with guest appearances on American TV sitcoms and a handful of Disney movies, before hitting the big time at just 12, playing a teenage prostitute in Martin Scorsese’s classic 1976 movie, Taxi Driver.
She was a teen star, with films like Bugsy Malone, Freaky Friday, and Candleshoe, but she took time off to go to Yale University at 18, where she studied literature.
Jodie returned to Hollywood to do what very few actors had done at the time – transition from child actor to adult star.
‘My characters were always complex and human,’ she told me, ‘so when it was time for me to play adult roles, people accepted it very easily.’
I feel no pressure to look glamorous, that’s just not me
Now, with a resumé that includes The Accused (1988) and The Silence Of The Lambs (1991), both of which she won Oscars for, she can pick and choose roles.
‘It takes me years to find one I’m really interested in,’ she says.
One element that attracted her to Hotel Artemis – written and directed by Drew Pearce, the British writer behind 2015’s Mission Impossible: Rogue Nation – was its Los Angeles setting.
‘This film beautifully combines science fiction kick-a** horror with a real nostalgia for what LA used to be.’
Jodie lives in the city with her wife of four years, actress Alexandra Hedison. But when I ask about her, Jodie – who famously spoke of her sexuality at the 2013 Golden Globe Awards – clams up.
‘I think,’ she says, slowly, ‘the speech I made speaks for itself. I was receiving a Lifetime Achievement Award, which, the way I saw it, was not about my last movie, but what I’d achieved in my life.
Jodie (pictured in Bugsy Malone) took time to study at university after starring in films such as Bugsy Malone, Freaky Friday, and Candleshoe
‘I said lots of things I needed to say, and other people have since had lots to say about it. But I have nothing else to add.’
She is more comfortable talking about her sons, Charlie, 20, and Kit, 16.
‘They’re boys, you know? Last night was the premiere of the movie, and I went home and my knee was hurting [she injured it in a skiing accident earlier this year].
‘I have a machine to exercise my leg, and when I was on it, a bunch of boys came over! I said, ‘This is when you’re starting the evening? At midnight?’ They were raiding the pantry, then they got out flutes and started playing at 3am. I’m trying to sleep, saying, ‘Damn it, be quiet!’ That keeps you down to earth.’
She admits her boys haven’t managed to drag her into the digital age. ‘I thought the digital revolution would make music easier to access, but it just means I can’t use my CD player.
‘I curse it for that. And I’m not on social media. I don’t know what I do with the time that I’m not on social media: I’m not solving world peace or doing equations on nuclear fission.’
Skiing, despite its dangers, is the activity that clears her mind.
‘If you’re going down a hill incredibly fast then all you can think about is your movements and the trees and the wind – if you start to think about taxes or Donald Trump, you’ll crash. It gets me to tune everything out.’
She ponders for a moment. ‘Kind of like acting,’ she concludes.
Hotel Artemis is in cinemas now.