Jodie Foster is “grateful” for queer trailblazer Kristen Stewart

Jodie Foster says she is “grateful” for queer trailblazer Kristen Stewart.

In a new Variety profile of Stewart, who co-starred with Foster in 2002’s Panic Room when she was just 11 years old, the two-time Oscar winner got uncharacteristically candid about her own coming out journey as well as how her reluctance to do so may have been viewed by a generation of fans.

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“I’m a little speechless,” she said. “I just never expected to ever be here again.”

“I get a lot of questions about who I was and what I represented in the industry,” Foster said. “Was I helpful in terms of representation?”

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Unlike Stewart, who came out publicly on Saturday Night Live in 2017 when she was 27, Foster was famously cagey about her sexuality for decades before tacitly coming out publicly for the first time while accepting the Cecil B. DeMille Award at the 2013 Golden Globe Awards.

“I’m sure there’s a 12- or 13- or 14-year-old when I was making movies as a young person who said that I had something to offer to them in their life as a queer person,” she continued. “I had to do it my way. I had pioneers to help the way, who I’m grateful for. And now people can be grateful for Kristen for being the pioneer. I’m just — I’m grateful to her.”

Stewart, meanwhile, is adamant about representing queer women onscreen. She’s particularly excited about her role in Saint Maud director Rose Glass’s Love Lies Bleeding, in which she plays a soft butch woman in a torrid affair with a female body builder (Katy M. O’Brian). And she told Variety that she refuses to appear in another film until she gets her adaptation of bisexual author Lidia Yuknavitch memoir The Chronology of Water made.

She’s also been reconsidering the queerness apparent in some of her earliest work. A recent re-watch of Panic Room led to a revelation: “I was gay,” she said of her performance in the David Fincher-directed thriller.  

She even notes the queer subtext in the Twilight films.

“I can only see it now,” she said. “I don’t think it necessarily started off that way, but I also think that the fact that I was there at all, it was percolating. It’s such a gay movie. I mean, Jesus Christ, Taylor [Lautner] and Rob [Pattinson] and me, and it’s so hidden and not OK. I mean, a Mormon woman wrote this book. It’s all about oppression, about wanting what’s going to destroy you. That’s a very Gothic, gay inclination that I love.”