Jodie Foster Dedicates Best Actress in a Limited Series Emmy to Northern Alaska’s Indigenous People

Tatiana Tenreyro
·2 min read
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At the 2024 Emmys, Jodie Foster won best lead actress in a limited series for her role as Liz Danvers in True Detective: Night Country. This marks the first time Foster has received an Emmy after being nominated three times prior.

“This is an incredibly emotional moment for me,” Foster said while accepting the award, “because True Detective: Night Country was just a magical experience and it all comes from the top, beautiful, wonderful, talented — I love you so much — Issa López, la reina, who dreamed up this crazy Liz Danvers for me.”

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Foster also gave shoutouts to True Detective’s “incredible, incredible Icelandic crew” and the cast. “Gosh, I love you guys all so much from everywhere in the world, but especially my champ, my partner in Crime, Kali Reis,” she said.

The actress also wanted to recognize “mostly the indigenous people, the Inupiat and Inuit people, of Northern Alaska who just told us their stories and they allowed us to listen and that was just a blessing.

“It was love, love, love and when you feel that, something amazing happens; it’s deep and wonderful and it’s older than this place in this time,” Foster continued. “That’s just the message: which is love and work equals art.” She asked her sons, Charlie and Kit, to “remember that.” Foster then closed her speech with a shoutout to “the love of [her] life,” her wife, Alex.

Speaking with The Hollywood Reporter in January, Foster admitted she was hesitant to accept her True Detective role. “It wasn’t an easy yes,” she said. “I loved the script — loved the script — but I didn’t feel like I was right to play Danvers. The character was written very differently, not for someone my age, and I felt like there are some changes that happen at that age that needed to be addressed.”

Showrunner and director López explained that the initial concept for the character was “a woman on the verge of breaking down, because I’ve never seen Jodie do that — a woman on the verge of losing it, and then gets strength.” However, Foster wasn’t quite on board with this approach for Danvers, so López found a compromise: “I turned to her and said, ‘OK, so you want me to make her an asshole?’ And she said, ‘Yeah!’ And I was like, ‘I love that mission.’”

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