What Happened to Sara Foster?

Watching The Big Bounce, I was reminded of Sara Foster, an actor I admittedly have not thought about in a while. There’s a reason for that. But in 2004, when The Big Bounce was released, Foster made a splash as the star of Angela Robinson’s film D.E.B.S. It’s not as though she hasn’t done anything since 2004 but that year and those films were her big shot and neither film did especially well. The Big Bounce failed and was, as I wrote, not great. And D.E.B.S. is a cult hit and beloved by many but unfortunately it wasn’t a huge hit.

The fact that she played two different characters - and managed to romance Owen Wilson and Jordana Brewster between the two films - is interesting enough. In The Big Bounce, Foster plays a femme fatale, essentially, though that’s not initially what she seems to be. That reveal and her complexity is built into the structure of the film. And she’s good. But then there are also these moments in the film between her and Wilson where one can see the texture of a different kind of film and a different kind of acting. The kind of casual charm and improvised feel that was so key to the relationship between her and Brewster in D.E.B.S.

Who knows how good she really is as an actor. But it’s the not knowing, the never getting the chance that must really drive actors crazy. I mean, we all want at shot at whatever we do. We want to get in the room. We want to have a real opportunity and if we fail, we’re going to spend our lives reliving it and it’s going to hang over everything else we do like the sword of Damocles. But at least you had a chance. Being an actor, that rarely happens. Auditioning is hard. And if you actually get a part, so many people will judge you on one role. They’ll say, I hate that character and find the character so grating and so therefore I hate the actor. (Or worse, getting typecast as an annoying grating character and then everyone only thinks of you as that character…which if it meant you were laughing all the way to the bank is one thing, but often that’s not how it works out). How many actors can say that they had a shot? That they had a good role in a good project, and no matter how it turned out, they had a legitimate shot. It’s not that we only get one shot in life. But you never know what’s your last shot. That chance to prove to yourself and others what you can do and what you’re capable of.

In other words, it sucks being an actor. It’s hard. I think about the most talented people I’ve known and how few chances they had and the work it took.

And so the title of this post is obvious. What happened to Sara Foster is what’s happened to so many young actors. If she were a man, she probably would have gotten a few more chances. (Which is a whole other topic) One can’t help but think about the number of actors who get a few roles and then disappear. Or the ones who never got those roles, never even got in the room for one reason or another that had nothing to do with talent.

But also, I’d watch a movie with Sara Foster as a forty year old bisexual mom who’s also a criminal mastermind.

Maybe one of these years…