Jodie Foster recalls ‘sticky’ mishap moments before SNL hosting debut

Jodie Foster has recalled getting into a “sticky” situation the night she hosted Saturday Night Live at the age of 14.

Foster, now 62, was the youngest host in SNL history when she presented the sketch show on November 27, 1976, the same year she starred in Martin Scorsese’s Taxi Driver. That record has since been broken by Drew Barrymore, who was just 7 years old when she hosted SNL in 1982.

Speaking to Entertainment Weekly, Foster recalled a “bad memory” from the night.

“Right before I went on, like maybe a half an hour before I went on, I had what was called an Orange Julius," she explained, referring to the frothy, smoothie-like citrus drink.

“I had a big Orange Julius and it fell all over my pants. And they were like, ‘Well, we don't have time to [change],’ so, the whole [monologue], I was sticky.”

Foster observed that she’s never returned to host SNL — which recently returned for Season 51 — saying she “may have been asked, but I've never done it again.” As to whether she’d be interested in returning to the show, Foster added: “I don't know. Probably not.”

Her candid recollection of the SNL gig comes months after she observed that she doesn’t understand why young actors accept roles in “bad” movies.

Her own career began when she worked as a model when she was just three years old. She was nominated for her first Oscar for Taxi Driver less than a decade later at age 12.

Speaking to Variety, Foster said she still enjoys acting but is picky about her projects and that she wasn’t interested in “acting for the sake of acting.”

“I see a lot of young actors, and I’m not saying I’m jealous, but I don’t understand how they just want to act. They don’t care if the movie’s bad. They don’t care if the dialogue is bad. They don’t care if they’re a grape in a Fruit of the Loom ad,” she said.

“If I never acted again, I wouldn’t really care. I really like to be a vessel for story or cinema. If I could do something else, if I was a writer or a painter or sculptor, that would be good too. But this is the only skill I have.”

She added that in her own career, she had “worked so much” by the time she turned 18 that she needed to take a different approach when choosing her projects.

Foster will next be seen in A Private Life (Vie Privée), a French thriller in which she plays a therapist who becomes convinced that her patient’s suicide is a murder.