Jodie Foster proves a friend indeed to give Gibson the chance of forgiveness

Jodie Foster endured her own annus horribilis. It was 30 years ago in the aftermath of the attempted assassination of then-President Ronald Reagan by John Hinckley, a Foster fan who wanted to prove his love by re-enacting a scene from Taxi Driver.

Foster was 13 when she played Iris, the pre-teen hooker who captures the heart of Robert De Niro’s psychotic New York cabbie, Travis Bickle. Who could have imagined that the movie would one day inspire some maniac to take a pot shot at the President?

It was a tough time. Foster was a student at Yale, rehearsing for a play, when the news broke. She immediately went into hiding. Naturally, it took her a long time to deal with the Hinckley episode.

Now, all these years later, she’s embroiled in another, altogether different, scandal involving something she cannot control. This time, it involves a friend. And she has been unswervingly loyal.

The friend, of course, is her co-star in 1994’s Maverick, Mel Gibson. The film is Foster’s pet project, The Beaver. And the scandal is the fall-out from Gibson’s apocalyptic domestic meltdown with his former lover, Oksana Grigorieva, which was recorded and leaked to the world.

But more of Gibson’s travails later. In the meantime, there is the film itself, a frankly bizarre tale of a depressed and suicidal executive who finds a hand-puppet – the aforementioned beaver – in the trash and begins to use it to communicate with his nearest and dearest.

The film itself was barely guaranteed box office gold; casting Gibson was an act of loyalty that became an act of folly that became, in time, a concrete block of controversy just waiting to drag the film to the depths. So why contemplate it in the first place? It is, by Foster’s own admission, “a weird movie”.

“I know it’s a strange movie,” says the two-time Oscar winner. “It has an odd tone to it and I love that. Despite the fact that it has an odd storytelling technique, it’s a fable. It’s been a long haul. So many different feelings go into it and it’s hard to erase all the difficulties of it – all the drama and all that stuff, but I am really proud of it.”

The Beaver was born of the pen of Kyle Killen and leapt to the top of Hollywood’s so-called Black List of best unproduced screenplays. Originally, comedian Steve Carell was slated to star as Walter Black, an exhausted businessman whose life has run spectacularly off the rails. Then the director dropped out and it passed to Foster who had read the script and expressed an interest to her agent.

She re-wrote the script with Killen and began the process of thinking about casting. That’s when Gibson’s name first came up.

“When I first came on board, Steve Carell was still attached, so he was in my mind,” remembers Foster. “I was thinking, ‘Hmmm, Steve Carell, what’s that going to be like?’ But very quickly it got onto Mel.”

And that’s all she says about Gibson, the intense, energised, edgy actor-turned-director whose star and box office appeal plummeted after his astonishing anti-Semitic kerbside rant at a Malibu cop in 2006, followed up by the recordings of his notorious verbal tirade towards Grigorieva in 2010.

Yet Foster may also be playing a game. Observers of Gibson’s increasingly erratic behaviour in recent years have pointed to the Jekyll and Hyde nature of his personality – the happy-go-lucky great-to-be-around guy who, in his darker moments, reveals himself to be a racist, homophobic, misogynistic drunk.

Foster has been forthright in her defence of Gibson, and has urged his critics to take another look at the man who lurched from A-list legend to pariah. Some have called her “deluded”.

Made in 2009 and long delayed, The Beaver finally premiered at the Texas film festival, SXSW, on March 18 this year. Gibson didn’t attend. Foster opened up about the demons driving her friend to oblivion.

“People have struggles in life. Most of us don’t have ours expressed on the internet,” she said.

“Do I think he’s made mistakes or do I think he’s made mistakes handling his mistakes? Absolutely. He has been through a tornado of crisis in his life. If nobody ever sees a film of his again, he’ll have to accept that.”

In Cannes, on May 17, Foster and a greying, heavily-lined Gibson took to the red carpet for the film’s screening. Earlier, Foster faced the Press alone and continued her supportive PR blitz on behalf of her friend.

“I can’t excuse Mel’s behaviour,” she said baldly. “Only he can explain that, and we’re all responsible for our own behaviour. I do know the man that I know, who’s probably the most loved actor in Hollywood.”

The industry town where Gibson has made his career base since the mid-1980s has not forgiven him.

Neither have audiences. The Beaver flopped in tailspin fashion in the US, taking just $100,000 on its opening weekend. Foster and distributors Icon must have higher hopes for Europe.

“This film is about a man who has everything he should want, everything he did want at one point in his life, things that made him happy.

“But I think that’s the difference between really understanding depression and not understanding it,” says Foster about Walter Black.

She could easily be speaking about 55-year-old Gibson.

“He’s not depressed because he’s rich; he’s not depressed because his house looks like everybody else’s house; he’s depressed because he chemically has something going on in his body that he can’t control.

“Mel is both characters, although the character of Walter has very few lines in the film. I think he has 10 lines of dialogue in the entire movie.

“Playing Walter is difficult. Walter’s a lost man who’s weak and can barely communicate. In terms of him being the beaver, even though I would see the beaver on screen, I always look at Mel.

“What I see is somebody who is speaking through this character but you can still see the pain behind his face.”

Foster, now 48, won Academy Awards in 1989 and 1992 for The Accused and The Silence of the Lambs. These days, she works when she finds a role she can’t ignore, and claims the fire has gone out of her ambition. However, unlike some of her contemporaries, she claims the jobs are still there for women of a certain age.

“I don’t think there’s a shortage of roles. You look at what Meryl Streep is doing and what people are doing on cable television, and the limits are totally changed.

“You naturally slow down a little bit when you get older and you have children. There’s a series of things that are just of no interest to you any more. The thing that interests me the most now is working with great directors. That’s the thing that’s keeping me in there.

“If I can find a movie every two years that I want to do, that’s amazing. I don’t have that, ‘Unless I’m acting I’m nothing’ feeling. My Oscars are a part of my childhood.”

It would be glib to say that, with The Beaver, serious job offers might also be part of her childhood – or at least the recent past.

But Foster has shown great courage in helming this most peculiar of projects, and in casting Gibson, she has put on parade her loyalty to a friend in need.

The Beaver (12A) opens in the UK on June 17.