Golden Boy Jon Foster Shares His Inner Light
This spring’s coming-of-age golden boy has got to be Jon Foster. Mild and lean, he’s taken the central position first in Mysteries of Pittsburgh (alongside Sienna Miller and Peter Sarsgaard) and now the ensemble drama The Informers, playing young men who observe the world they’re growing up in with a quiet air of dismay—and just happen to be bi-curious.
The Informers is set in LA in 1983-the year before Foster was born. Based on stories by Brett Easton Ellis, it’s about rich kids who have everything and care about nothing. It’s kind of like “The Hills,” but with an 80’s soundtrack and more coke. Foster went along with the comparison. “We’re playing people who are so self-absorbed, so narcissistic, so unbelievably misguided and neglected that in the end everyone ends up doomed. In some ways The Informers is an expose and in some ways it’s a satire. You’re not quite sure whether or not to laugh, which is pretty much my reaction when I’ve seen ‘The Hills.'” He’s right to point out that the movie, unlike “The Hills,” makes a point of saying that this sort of life never ends well.
PHOTO: RD/LEON
“My upbringing couldn’t have been more opposite,” he adds. At the school he went to in Fairfield, Iowa, before moving to LA in middle school, he practiced transcendental meditation and studied Sanskrit in the first grade. (We communicated by email; I don’t think he was being sarcastic.) Now he sounds like a seasoned LA transplant when he says, “There’ll be times when you’ll find yourself in an Informers moment at some bright and shiny event, [but] I’ve spent my twelve years in LA doing my best to find soulful good-hearted people to spend my time with.”
Presumably, Sophia Bush has been one of them; they were an item a while ago, and in one TMZ-style YouTube video of them on Robertson Boulevard, he politely retrieves the hat of the jerk-off behind the camera, who asks him, “Who are you and why are you hanging out with a super-starlet?”
Both roles, Foster (who’s the younger brother of “Six Feet Under” actor Ben Foster) says, had him “trying to find a way to build up such a strong barrier to suffocate the ‘inner light’ but still allowing it to shine through the cracks.” He also points out that “the great thing both films had in common was that I had the opportunity to get naked and simulate having sex with both my male and female co-stars, and that’s the main reason I got into acting in the first place.” Okay, this time I can tell he’s joking.