Jodie Foster faces backlash after branding Gen Z ‘annoying’

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Jodie Foster took a joking swipe at Gen Z during a recent interview, calling them annoying to work with.

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But as her words went viral, becoming a trending item on Google, her assessment of the generation born from the late 1990s to 2010 quickly divided the Internet, with some praising the Oscar winner for her candor as others criticized Foster for being out of touch, likening her to the Old Man Yells At Cloud meme from a 2002 episode of The Simpsons.

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“They’re really annoying, especially in the workplace,” Foster, 61, told The Guardian of Generation Z. “They’re like, ‘Nah, I’m not feeling it today, I’m gonna come in at 10:30 a.m.’ Or, like, in emails, I’ll tell them this is all grammatically incorrect, did you not check your spelling? And they’re like, ‘Why would I do that, isn’t that kind of limiting?’”

Foster, who was a child actress, praised Last of Us star Bella Ramsey for her understated appearance, but said many of the young actors she meets “need to learn how to relax.”

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“They need to learn how to relax, how to not think about it so much, how to come up with something that’s theirs,” she said. “I can help them find that, which is so much more fun than being, with all the pressure behind it, the protagonist of the story.”

As outlets reported on Foster’s rant, the two-time Oscar winner faced backlash on social media as followers debated her comments.

“Jodie Foster s****ing on Gen Z is so very boring. Surely every single generation, as they hit late teens / early 20s was criticized for the same sorts of things? And it’s so convenient that we forget exactly how arrogant / lazy / ridiculous we were in our youth,” one person dismissed.

“Oh, she forgot her parents generation dumping on hers. And the generation before that dumping on theirs,” another wrote, with a third adding, “Criticizing an entire generation reveals more about yourself than the actual said generation.”

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“The boomers moaning about laziness … can’t stand the idea that this gen are way ahead in their attitudes towards work and giving away too much of themselves,” one person added, while another asked, “Aren’t the older generations to blame for raising them?”

But Foster’s assessment earned her plenty of praise, with commenters calling her remarks “Spot on!” and some branding Gen Zers as “entitled little s***s”

“I’m right there with you,” one person wrote on X. “I work with 20-somethings and they leave me a note and it’s nonsensical. I need a translator.”

“Jodie is spot on about grammar and spelling,” a third person wrote. “If language skills fall apart, then EVERYTHING falls apart.”

Last year, Foster went viral when she called superhero movies “a phase.”

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“It’s a phase. It’s a phase that’s lasted a little too long for me, but it’s a phase, and I’ve seen so many different phases,” Foster told Elle magazine. “Hopefully people will be sick of it soon. The good ones — like Iron Man, Black Panther, The Matrix — I marvel at those movies, and I’m swept up in the entertainment of it, but that’s not why I became an actor. And those movies don’t change my life. Hopefully there’ll be room for everything else.”

But the mother of two wasn’t completely down about the state of the film industry, as she vociferously praised Oscar winner Everything Everywhere All at Once.

“That’s the film that I will return to over and over again whenever I feel depressed or sad,” Foster told Elle.

“I first saw it with one of my sons, and we held hands and pinched each other and cried for 45 minutes afterward,” she said. “And then I saw it with my other son a week later, and it just opened a portal of connection and understanding and hope. He started telling me everything from his high school that he’d never told me, and we were walking in the rain crying and opening up. And I was like, ‘This is what film can do.’”

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X: @markhdaniell

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