Jodie Foster Reveals a Lion Picked Her Up with Its Mouth on a Movie Set: ‘The Crew Was Running’

Jodie Foster had a very close encounter with a lion on the film set!

During a recent appearance on The Graham Norton Show, The actress, 61, revealed to the titular host and his other celebrity guests, which included Olivia Colman, that she experienced a terrifying moment while filming the 1972 film. Napoleon and Samantha.

In the film, Foster was 9 years old when she starred alongside a young Michael Douglas and Johnny Whitaker. She and Whitaker played children who go on a trip with their pet lion instead of saying goodbye to him.

Foster recalled that there were three lions on set: the main lion, a stunt lion, and a backup lion, the last of which was the one with which she had the incident.

“We finished filming and I was walking up a hill and all I remember is seeing his mane flip and then he picked me up sideways and shook me in his mouth and flipped me around,” Foster said.

The True Detective: Nightland The star continued: “Every single person on the team was running in the opposite direction and I’m kind of watching from the sidelines — and they took their gear.”

The Silence of the Lambs star recounted the event with amusement in her voice, but the other guests on stage – Colman, comedian Wanda Sykes and Scottish presenter Lorraine Kelly – looked on in shock.

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“I’m watching everybody walk away saying, ‘What’s going on,'” Foster said, adding that she remembers thinking it was an earthquake because she was shaking.

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“The trainer said, ‘Drop it,’ and because the lion was so well trained, he opened his mouth and put me down and I ran,” she said.

But the lion “came for” Foster, she said, noting that he “put one paw on me and then just waited like ‘I’ve got it,'” she said with a laugh.

Sykes then joked that she would fight a lion to protect Foster.

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Source: HIS Education