Interview: Toni Collette on Hereditary

With a strong-featured, hyper-expressive face whose wide-set eyes don't appear to miss a thing and a joie de vivre that she radiates in person as well as on screen, Toni Collette imbues all her characters with a grounded sense of realism as well as layers of emotional nuance. Ever since she captured international attention as the endearingly open-hearted title character in Muriel's Wedding, she's been in constant demand, playing a wide range of parts—from warmly nurturing, realistically harried moms in films like The Sixth Sense and Little Miss Sunshine to The United States of Tara's title character, a woman with dissociative identity disorder who's fighting to keep herself and her family together while coping with an evolving cast of alter egos.

Collette has been exceptionally prolific in the past year or so, appearing in 11 films and two TV series since 2017, with three more films currently in post-production, but her tour-de-force performance in Hereditary stands out even in that tsunami of output. Always intense and increasingly desperate, Collette's Annie is our guide into the bloody heart of darkness that's writer-director Ari Aster's debut feature, a psychological horror film about a mother who keeps losing the people she loves in ever more macabre catastrophes.

I talked with Collette this week at the New York office of A24, Hereditary's U.S. distributor, about the advantages of aging and how she's learned to protect herself from the afflictions her characters endure.

Interview: Jodie Foster on Hotel Artemis

Though she's a two-time Academy Award winner (for The Accused and The Silence of the Lambs), Jodie Foster has always been a bit of an outlier in Hollywood. As a child actor, her precocious self-assurance, intelligence, and self-described “gruff” voice made her something of an anomaly when she played bright young things in family-friendly TV shows like My Three Sons and films like Napoleon and Samantha. Then, in a run of emotionally complex roles in darker fare, most notably as a 13-year-old prostitute with a riveting mixture of childish innocence and world-weariness in Martin Scorsese's Taxi Driver, the actress's knowing gravitas found a worthy showcase.

That pattern has more or less held throughout Foster's career, as she has alternated between intelligently crafted TV shows and films like Spike Lee's Inside Man and lush melodramas or slick genre movies in which her nuanced, stubbornly realistic performances stood out like an elegant dive into a kiddie pool. Foster is now at the core of an ensemble cast in writer-director Drew Pearce's Hotel Artemis, a dystopian fantasy set in L.A. in a not-too-distant future in which the hotel of the title serves as a secret, members-only hospital reserved for criminals who pay an annual membership fee.

Last week I spoke with Foster, who plays the nurse who tends to the troublesome group of tenants, about Hotel Artemis and other things, including the time she was attacked by a lion, the memorable afternoon she spent with Toni Morrison, and the alternate lives she kicks herself for not having led.

You're quoted on IMDb as having said that you're better suited for independent films as a director and producer, and that you think you're best in mainstream films as an actress because your style of acting is too “linear” for indie films. First of all, did you actually say that?
I think I did, but I'm always cursing myself for the stupid things that I say in print. I don't think it's wrong, but I do think that indies are different now. The theatrical world and our viewing habits have changed so much that, increasingly, real story and narrative is found on cable and streaming.