Jodie Foster Says 'Sexually Suggestive Scenes' That Her Sister Stood In For During “Taxi Driver” Shoot Were 'Nothing' Compared to Today
- - Jodie Foster Says 'Sexually Suggestive Scenes' That Her Sister Stood In For During “Taxi Driver” Shoot Were 'Nothing' Compared to Today
Victoria EdelJanuary 21, 2026 at 8:14 AM
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Jodie Foster in 'Taxi Driver' (left); Jodie Foster in 2025 (right) -
Jodie Foster opened up about making 1976's Taxi Driver, where she played a 12-year-old who is sex trafficked
Foster remembered that her sister Connie was her body double during 'sexually suggestive scenes,' but reflected that with a modern lens, they weren't actually that risqué
Foster received her first Oscar nomination for the film
Jodie Foster thinks the raciness of her Taxi Driver scenes were overblown.
Foster opened up about the movie on the Jan. 19 episode of Conan O’Brien Needs a Friend podcast. Foster was 12 when director Martin Scorsese cast her in his 1976 film, which starred Robert De Niro as Travis Bickle, a disaffected taxi driver. Foster played Iris, a 12-year-old who’s being sex trafficked by her boyfriend.
O’Brien, 62, noted, “You can't be aware that this is going to become a touchstone film and a real, I would say pivot point for 1970s movies. And it's going to be so important in so many ways. You can't know that at the time.”
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Jodie Foster (left) and Robert de Niro in 'Taxi Driver'
“No. But he was a great director and I had already done Alice Doesn't Live Here Anymore with him,” Foster, now 63, said. She was 9 when she appeared in that 1974 film. “He was this extraordinary up-and-coming director.”
O’Brien pointed out that Foster’s sister, Connie, was her stand in for “some of the more sexually suggestive scenes in Taxi Driver.”
“They weren't really very suggestive,” Foster said. She explained that at the time, “The Board of Education started having issues with the idea of young kids doing more adult roles. They were concerned that somehow, you know, playing these characters that we would be confused about ourselves and who we were,” she said.
“So, when I was about to do Taxi Driver, the Board of Education came down and said, ‘Okay, we're not going to sign the work permit for this,’ ” she remembered. They had to hire a lawyer to “prove that I was competent.”
She explained, “Part of the deal that we made with them was if there are any sexually suggested scenes, we'll get somebody else to do it. And my mom was like, ‘Look, her sister can come to New York for the summer. She's over 18 and she's about the same size.’ And so that's what happened.”
But Foster says with modern eyes, she doesn’t think anything in the script was as risqué as people worried.
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Jodie Foster in November 2025
“They weren't very suggestive,” she said. “I think it was her taking down her shirt to below her shoulders, right? So that's nothing.”
O’Brien joked, “Which they do on Nickelodeon now.” Foster agreed. “And I think I was supposed to like undo his fly. That was about it,” she said. Foster added that it was “nice” to have her sister on set with her.
Foster, who stars in the new movie A Private Life, earlier this month shared that she recently reflected on how she escaped abuse as a child star, as many of her peers were not so lucky.
"I've really had to examine that, like, how did I get saved?” she said in an interview with NPR. “There were microaggressions, of course. Anybody who's in the workplace has had misogynist microaggressions. That's just a part of being a woman, right? But what kept me from having those bad experiences, those terrible experiences?"
She shared that having "a certain amount of power" at a young age led her to a different path, especially after she received an Oscar nomination for Taxi Driver.
"By the time I had my first Oscar nomination, I was part of a different category of people that had power and I was too dangerous to touch. I could've ruined people's careers or I could've called 'Uncle,' so I wasn't on the block," she said.
on People
Source: “AOL Entertainment”
