On March 30, 1981, — 70 days after Ronald Reagan became president of the United States — a man named John Hinckley Jr. attempted to assassinate him. The attempt took place as Regan was leaving a conference at the Washington Hilton Hotel. The president and three other people were wounded after being shot. Hinckley Jr. admitted at trial that he was not motivated by politics: he was obsessed with actress Jodie Foster after seeing her play a teenage prostitute in the 1976 classic Taxi Driver. He also admitted that he had attempted to assassinate Reagan in a bid to impress Foster, stating that the shooting was “the greatest love offering in the history of the world.”
For Foster, who is now 61 years old, this supposed love offering only left her with a trauma that she has carried around for more than 40 years and that has stopped her from doing theater. “I’m finally able to admit that the one bit of theater I did when I was in college, there was so much trauma involved in it — well, just quickly, the play happened in two weekends, and I did the first weekend, and in between the first weekend and the second weekend, John Hinckley shot the president,” she says in an interview with actress Jodie Comer in Interview magazine.
The Silence of the Lambs star says that she never wanted to talk publicly about this moment. In fact, for years, she introduced clauses in her media interviews that prohibited any mention of the subject. It has taken four decades for her to open up about the experience and what it meant for her. “The world fell apart, there were Secret Service people everywhere, I had bodyguards, and I had to be taken to a safe house, and I was in the middle of these two weekends of this play, and I had the dumb idea of ‘the show must go on.’ So I was like, ‘I have to do that second weekend,’” Foster explains.
However, Foster says that during that second weekend, there was a terrifying incident that left her traumatized.
“There were people everywhere, cameras everywhere, and there was a guy in the front row, and I had noticed that it was the second night that he’d been there, and I decided to, the whole play, yell, ‘f*ck you, motherf*cker!’ I just decided that I was going to use this guy,” she says. “And then the next day, it was revealed that this particular guy had a gun, and he had brought it to the performance, and then he was on the run, and I was in a class, and the bodyguard guy came and threw me onto the ground while I was in the class, which was really embarrassing, because there were only 10 people there.”
She reflects: “It was a traumatic moment, and I’ve never admitted that maybe that has something to do with how I never wanted to do a play again.”
Foster admits that she ultimately convinced herself to love theater and go to see plays, but somehow she felt like she couldn’t commit to performing on stage again. That part of his career was cut short by Hinckley Jr., who was found not guilty by reason of insanity, and in June 1982 was admitted to St. Elizabeth’s Psychiatric Hospital in Washington. The furor over the verdict led to the 1984 Insanity Defense Reform Act, which made it more difficult to obtain such a verdict.
After years of successive prison benefits, Hinckley was granted probation in 2016. “You probably don’t even know, but he shot him in order to impress me, and he had written letters to me, so it was a big moment in my life,” Foster tells Comer.
Comer — who has starred in plays in both London’s West End and on Broadway — asks Foster if he could “sway” her to get back on stage. “I’ll be the first 80-year-old person to go onstage with my walker, perhaps,” Foster jokes.
Hinckley, who is now 69 years old — he was 25 when he shot the president — was fully released from court restrictions in June 2022. A few days later, he had his first TV interview with CBS. In the interview, he expressed remorse for his actions and said that he did not remember what feelings led him to shoot Reagan. He also said he was sorry for all the lives affected by his actions and apologized to his family, Reagan and the family of James Brady, the White House press secretary who was hit in the head by a bullet and left partially paralyzed for life.
He also asked Foster for forgiveness. “I know that they probably can’t forgive me now, but I just want them to know that I am sorry for what I did,” said Hinkley. When asked what led him to shoot the president, he did not mention his obsession with the actress and simply replied: “It’s something I don’t want to remember.”
Forty-three years later, it is Foster who has broken her silence on the assassination attempt and how it affected her.
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