Jodie Foster, 63, looks back on the massive trauma she suffered from being ‘mauled by a lion’ at age 8 on a movie set

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In a recent interview, Jodie Foster recounted a frightening experience from her childhood involving a wild animal that nearly proved fatal.

The 63-year-old Oscar winner recently told W Magazine about the lasting injuries she suffered when a lion bit her while filming the 1972 Disney movie Napoleon and Samantha.

Foster shared that when he was around eight or nine years old, he was attacked by a lion. He explained that the lion grabbed him, shook him violently, tossed him around, and then let go.

The actress, who started her career as a child, described having four puncture wounds – two on each hip.

Shockingly, she almost made the life-threatening attack sound as if it was no big deal.

As time passes and the company grows, it’s hard to pinpoint the origins of old problems,” Foster explained. “They just seem to shift and reappear in different forms.

Foster explained that there’s no video of the actual attack because the lion struck immediately after filming stopped for a scene.

The actress said she doesn’t have many memories of the attack, explaining she was in shock at the time.

I’ll never forget it. I clearly remember seeing his mane lower as he focused on me. I’d worked with lions before, but nothing prepared me for when he actually picked me up! He didn’t just grab me, he lifted me, shook me around, and then turned me towards the camera crew. That’s when I saw everyone scatter – not backwards, but sideways! They just took off, hauling all their equipment with them, completely fleeing from me. It was a truly terrifying, but unforgettable, experience.

Foster explained that she was saved from the lion by an on-set animal trainer. 

‘I guess the trainer said, “Drop it,” and the lion dropped me out of his mouth,’ she recalled. 

Looking back, Foster said that experience was likely the most frightening of her entire filmmaking career. Surprisingly, she wasn’t even sure she had time to be scared while it was happening.

In a little-known Disney live-action movie, actors Foster and Johnny Whitaker play the main characters. They run away with a retired circus lion, hoping to find a goat herder (played by Michael Douglas) who can look after the lion when Napoleon’s grandfather passes away.

To demonstrate how unsafe working conditions were at the time, Foster explained that she immediately returned to work with the same dangerous lion after recovering from an injury.

Foster was deeply shaken by the attack and became afraid of the lion whenever she found herself in a risky situation with him.

After being released from the hospital and cleared to return to work, I went back to handling the same lion, but this time I had a rooster with me. The rooster wasn’t used to being around that lion. I noticed the lion looking at me, as if he might come after me, so I threw the rooster and ran. Looking back, that was probably the most frightening moment of my career.

Years before, while on The Tonight Show in 2008, Jodie Foster shared a story about the lion attack on set. She explained that the lion involved – and the one that later scared her during the scene with the rooster – wasn’t the original lion, but a replacement named Simba.

Foster said she had no problems with the primary lion on set, Zamba. She also mentioned that years before, during a 1966 episode of the show, a lion almost attacked Bob Denver, the star of Gilligan’s Island.

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2026-01-20 17:39