Jodie Foster Details ‘Scariest’ Moment When She Was Mauled by a Lion While Filming a Disney Movie

Jodie Foster recently opened up about a terrifying encounter she had on the set of the 1972 film Napoleon and Samantha, and the incident left her with permanent scars.

“I was mauled by a lion when I was 8.5, 9 years old,” Foster, 63, said during an interview with W Magazine on January 6. “The lion picked me up, shook me around, moved me horizontally and then dropped me.”

The True Detective alum continued, “I had two perfect punctures on one side and then two perfect punctures on the other side on my hip.”

Foster joked that as she grew up, the scars had moved.

“Who even knows where they are anymore?” she laughed.

The Silence of the Lambs star explained that the moment happened after she’d completed a shot for the movie so none of it was caught on film, and she admitted that she doesn’t “really remember that much.”

“I remember the event,” she said. “I saw his mane come forward, and I had worked with the lions, so when he picked me up and then picked me up and moved me sideways and shook me around. So, as he turned me back toward the whole camera crew, I saw the whole camera crew run.”

Foster went on to add that she remembered the crew picking up their equipment and running away from her, but thankfully, the lion trainer on set stepped in.

“I guess the trainer said, ‘Drop it,’ and the lion dropped me out of his mouth,” she told the interviewer. “I think that was probably the scariest thing that has ever happened to me when I was making a movie.”

The live-action Disney film centered around Foster’s character, Samantha, and her friend Napoleon, played by Johnny Whitaker, who run away into the wilderness of the Pacific Northwest with a tame lion named Napoleon.

Despite Foster’s horrifying experience, she went right back to work filming with the same lion that had previously had her clamped in his jaws.