Foster plays defense attorney Nancy Hollander, a woman of contradictions with a love for black leather jackets, bright red nail polish and lipstick, and country music. But she’s also a woman with a stellar, measured legal mind. “She’s one of those great social justice heroes,” Foster tells Parade.com in this exclusive interview. “She has seen her mission as upholding the rule of law and the Constitution, and the right for everybody to have a vigorous defense. And that means sometimes, in fact, very often, defending very guilty people. I actually think that she’s lost a lot of cases, and she doesn’t mind.” The Mauritanian is based on Slahi’s New York Times best-selling memoir Guantánamo Diary, which is the true story of his fight for freedom after being detained and imprisoned at Guantanamo Bay without charge by the U.S. Government for years. Foster admits that before reading the script, she only had a vague knowledge of what went on at the detention camp. “I just assumed everybody that was there deserved to be there, but a good 80 percent of the people that found themselves as detainees at Guantanamo were just people that had been picked up because of the American flyers,” she says. “They’d send these flyers out that said, ‘Hey, listen, if you think that one of your neighbors might be a terrorist, or if you think somebody that you’ve met is a terrorist, call this number.’ That’s what they did and they’d pick those people up and randomly took them to foreign countries and kept them in jail.” Hollander was one of several lawyers who represented the detainees, and for Salahi (played in the film by Tahar Rahim), the evidence against him turned out to be mainly circumstantial. “The ACLU was able to debunk every single piece of circumstantial evidence in about 15 minutes, but at that time, after 9/11, it didn’t really matter to the government whether those people were legitimately guilty or not guilty, they just wanted to randomly take people off the street,” Foster says. Foster adds that she is not a political person, so she didn’t take on the role of Hollander to serve any specific doctrine. But that doesn’t mean she doesn’t want the movie to make a difference. “You hope that your film has an effect and that effect will somehow wake people up to vote, or force people to look at a dark part of history and to start doing the processing of truth and reconciliation that it takes in order to really genuinely change that chapter,” she says. “I hope that Guantanamo is closed. I know that was something Obama wanted to do, and wasn’t really able to do for whatever reason. It’s incredibly expensive to keep Guantanamo open. There’s only, I think, 14 detainees left.” Learn more about The Mauritanian, but also about how Foster picks her roles these days and what she thinks of Clarice heading to the small screen.
You’re very selective with your projects these days. It’s been two years or so since your last film, why this one?
I guess that’s the privilege of getting older, right? You can be a little more selective about what you do. I definitely told people that I was going to work less as I got older, at least, as an actress. I have to be moved, I guess. I never know what that’s going to be, whether it’s a comedy or it’s a thriller or sci-fi that’s going to capture my imagination. More and more as time goes on, I want the things that I do to feel meaningful. I feel like somehow, I’m getting better as a person, and, ultimately, that means that audiences are getting better instead of worse. So, I kind of never know what it is, but in this particular instance, it was really Mohamedou’s story. I really wanted to make sure that people heard that.
Did you get a chance to meet Nancy Hollander? And what advice did she have for you on how to get into character?
I did get to meet her a bunch of times before we started shooting; I got to go to her place, check out her books, and see her little tchotchkes. She has a very particular way of dressing. She wears a lot of black leather jackets, red nail polish and bright red lipstick. And she likes racecars and country-western music. She’s a bit of a character, but kind of a contradiction, because she’s not at all the person that you would think she would be from the outside. She’s also very methodical and very soft-spoken. There were things that I needed to change in order to serve Mohamedou’s story, and I had to ask her permission in some ways to ensure that I wasn’t just doing an imitation of her, that I was doing something that helped tell Mohamedou’s story over the course of time.
The torture aspect of the story was a big moment in the film. When Nancy realizes that, it changes the course of everything. Was that a standout moment for you?
That’s a pivotal moment. It’s not just that she realizes that there was some form of torture, but that he was coerced into giving that confession. And what it must have taken for him to be interrogated for seven years and for it to take seven years to finally coerce the mess of a confession that he made in that one day. The torture, obviously, is surprising. It’s sexual and psychological and has a lot to do with keeping somebody up for ridiculous amounts of time. Also, pretending that they’re taking him away on a boat and then bringing him back and telling him he’s gone somewhere else, all that sort of stuff. I thought that was a pivotal moment in the movie. And I wanted to have there be a shift in terms of the character once that happens.
You mentioned the sexual aspect. That was something I had never heard of before. We’ve heard about waterboarding, but that was such a surprise to me.
In the real story, that particular group used Star Wars masks. One day Mohamedou, who could hear them as they were coming, heard them fighting about who was going to be Luke Skywalker. We couldn’t use Star Wars, so we had to use other masks. But all of it was done with masks and to music and is pretty visceral.
I understand Mohamedou’s still on No-Fly lists. So, was he able to come to the set in South Africa? Did you get to meet him?
Yes, that’s probably the only place in the world that he was actually able to come to. He managed to figure out a way to get out of Mauritania. I think that was his first and last moment out of Mauritania. I think he may have gone to Senegal by car, but other than that, he has not been out of Mauritania since he left Guantanamo Bay.
We see him a bit at the end of the film in the credits, and he seems to still have such an upbeat attitude and a liking for American culture, which is so surprising. Did you get to talk to him about that at all?
Oh, yeah. He’s seen The Big Lebowski like 85 times, and the only movie that he had ever seen of mine was Maverick, which I thought was pretty funny. He’d seen Maverick quite a few times, so he knew all the little beats about Maverick. It’s surprising that he was able to go through what he was able to go through and that they weren’t able to break him of his humanity. That is really a feat, that through his faith he’s able to be kind and happy and joyful and affectionate and open and vulnerable. It doesn’t mean that there isn’t damage. He is a damaged person and there’s no amount of movie rights or bestselling book that’s going to be able to take away all the things that he’s missed. During the 15 years that he spent in prison, his mom died and he never got to say goodbye. So many parts of his life were left without him. It’s tough.
I’ve long admired you for putting your career on hold and going back to college at a time when you were the peak age for movie roles. People were probably telling you, “You’ll never work again if you stop and go to college,” and yet you did it. How did you know it was the right thing to do for you at that time?
I never thought I’d be an actor when I grew up. I thought my career would be over. My mom kept telling me, “Oh, when you’re 18, your career will be over, so you won’t be an actor anymore. You’ll be something else, a doctor, or a lawyer, or whatever." My education has always been important to me. I have always been a good student and I love that. I had to fight to have a real-life from the time that I was little, and part of that was fighting to have that part of the real-life that I’d always dreamed of. So, I wasn’t going to let anybody take that away from me.
Is that also what makes you so picky about your films, that you know what’s right for you and what’s not right for you? Do you have any films that you regret that you didn’t do?
Oh, sure. There’s a few here and there, but not that many. I can’t pull them out of a hat off hand. When people say, “Aren’t there parts out there that other people played?” I’m like, “Well, yeah. The Godfather, Lawrence of Arabia.” I can think of 100,000 movies that men made that would have been wonderful films had they’d been women as well, but in those days, that’s just not something that happened. We didn’t just make a movie about a lawyer and the lawyer just happened to be a man or woman. That just didn’t happen in those days. So, I don’t have any big regrets about things that I didn’t do.
Your kids are pretty much grown now, so that gives you more time. Do you think that might mean you’ll do more acting and directing?
I don’t know that it’ll mean I’ll take more acting roles. It frees me up a little bit just in terms of going away. I can go away for any length of time. As of the last three weeks, both of my kids are in college. So, it means I don’t have to live here. I guess it means I can change venues, but I don’t know. I don’t know what else changed. I have no idea, I suppose. We’ll see what the future brings.
I have to ask, what do you think about Clarice going to television?
More power to Clarice who continues the Thomas Harris legacy. Those books, like Red Dragonand Silence of the Lambs, were just such seminal important books and he’s such a great author, I’m glad that they were able to spawn all sorts of interesting things. Next, see who’s been nominated for a 2021 SAG Award.
