Famke Janssen Opens Up Regarding Her Career, Ambition, and Thoughts on the Director Woody Allen

Famke Janssen arrives outfitted for her photo session at the Covent Garden hotel in a manner that mirrors her character, Betty, from the new Netflix crime drama Amsterdam Empire – lacy and floral yet structured and short, paired with long school socks. Is the look sexy in a sardonic way, or is it sarcasm conveyed through fashion? We spend considerable time, in various ways, discussing being objectified, the beauty myths of the male-dominated society, and the collateral damage of the self – basically, sexism. Janssen has appeared in over sixty films across a 30-year career, and prior to that, she was a model. There is much to talk about.

I look strong, I am strong. I come from a lineage of strong women.

Amsterdam Empire represents the initial production she has undertaken in her home country, the Netherlands, and the first time she has acted in Dutch. Parts have arisen in the past, partly because she has siblings in the business – Marjolein Beumer, an actor, and Antoinette Beumer, a director – but nothing was quite right. “Then Netflix approached me with this pitch – it’s The War of the Roses combined with The Sopranos,” she explains. Well, yes and no: that’s certainly the narrative – Jack, portrayed by Jacob Derwig, is the mastermind of a cannabis business that is legal on the surface but illegal underneath. He starts the series by leaving Betty, a stunning beauty and one-hit-wonder pop star of yore, who refuses to go down without a fight.

It’s a fresh chapter for Netflix: if they produce a show in a foreign location, it’s true to that place. Amsterdam Empire seems highly unique, unprecedented. The conversations are remarkably blunt. It’s raunchy but so direct and explicit that, even while viewing the divorce play out in a strip club, on a bucking bronco in the shape of a large penis, you’re not remotely reminded of sex.

But the beating heart is the gradual shift of loyalty – Betty appears in the show as an quirky individual who has been cast aside, while Jack’s the leading man with a new love interest. She’s the one who steadily, and fully, gains the audience. “We have no information about Betty,” Janssen states; “we know everything about Jack. So I remarked, ‘It’s not a balanced competition.’ The reality that Betty lacks a child, she has no family member. She has no a friend. She has a dog that she has to take back, and she has her husband. When I read that character, I considered: ‘OK, I will do what I can to make this well-rounded. If I fail to see it on the page, I’m going to incorporate it in my acting.” In many ways, it’s the job she was born to do – “I’ve made a career out of playing women who are poorly developed.”

Janssen was born in Amstelveen, near Amsterdam, into a challenging existence that she describes vaguely but doesn’t sugarcoat. “From a early age, we were forced to fend for ourselves,” she recalls. “There were a lot of issues happening, there was drama. I understood, if I fail to care for myself, this isn’t going to end well.” She was viewed as the intellectual one of the three sisters, so wasn’t encouraged to do anything artistic, and ended up studying economics, “because I had a instructor, who said to the students, to everyone, ‘Oh, girls don’t understand science.’ A significant period of my life were disrupted, simply to demonstrate this man wrong.”

She started work young, accepting any job she could get – distributing newspapers, working in bars, in shops, “anything to earn my own money, to have my own independence”. She left home at 17, to become a model, and “it was only leaving the Netherlands, moving to the US, that I learned to aspire, figured out to create what I desired to create. It was a whole different culture, where I had approval.”

When you look at pictures of those modeling days – there’s a swimwear shoot with Janssen and Elle Macpherson that is so typically 80s it’s like time-travelling – there is something culturally contradictory about them. The look was extremely strong. This was before “heroin chic” and thinness; the archetype was physically robust, yet at the same time, there seemed to be an unspoken rule of, “Please, no one ask these women to say anything, they’re more effective when you just look at them.”

“For me,” she says, “that’s been the greatest challenge, because I’m so strong. I appear strong, I am strong. I come from a heritage of strong women. I’m not going to play some idiot in front of a male producer or director to obtain what I want. But I feel that could be the way certain individuals would go about it – because otherwise, if you go in too forcefully there, you know you’re being labelled at every turn, and you won’t receive anything.”

Janssen needed to put clear blue water between the modeling and her aspirations as an actress, and went to Columbia University in New York to pursue creative writing and writing, with cinema as a minor. She didn’t get her initial acting role until she was 28, and then GoldenEye came along in 1995, when she was 30. Xenia Onatopp was, perhaps, not an obvious choice of role. “I was quite conscious,” she says, “of the pitfalls of being a former model turned actress-turned-Bond girl. I thought ‘Bond girl’ was such a belittling term. But I reasoned: ‘I have little to lose; if I take this on, I’m going to go all the way.’ So I developed a lot of the elements that are now in the film, because I wanted to make a memorable character, not portray her the way she was written.”

Onatopp has been so deeply analysed, not just as a instance of Bond girl revival in the franchise – a shift away from interchangeable female characters towards women who could defeat you with their thighs, and whose only concern would be if they snagged their tights – but also for what, if any, statement it made about female empowerment as power, sadism as a baton passing from the male to the female. It became a bit heated, to say the least. Surely Onatopp was always conceived as a woman who gets off on thigh-squeezing men to death?

“I introduced a lot that was absent from the script,” says Janssen. “Things like the way she’s so ecstatic. I grew up on Bond movies, because my dad enjoyed them, and so I always viewed them as comedies, as tongue-in-cheek. I thought: ‘Let me make this character memorable.’ I went for broke. It could have not worked out. I am unsure where I got the boldness.”

It was a triumph, undoubtedly – but the consequence was that “after that, the roles that were being offered were every woman with a gun, in the background. Between my name, Famke Janssen, and having played a Russian, Xenia Onatopp, they were unsure what to do with me other than make me a foreigner who was villainous.”

It did not align with what she desired, and she struggled instead to get a role that truly was small, in the 1997 neo-noir City of Industry, featuring Harvey Keitel. “It’s an American woman. She works in a supermarket. She has limited funds. She lives in this shitty little house. It required a lot to secure that part, because Harvey at first just saw this glamorous person, with my history – experienced, whatever. He failed to recognize me, he saw this.” She gestures at herself, and naturally I understand what she means – star-power embodied. “And I thought: ‘But that’s not my upbringing.’ I arrived to the tryout dressed like a cashier, believing: avoid judging a book by its cover, allow me to pursue this, it’s interesting.”

From there, she went on to small-to-middling parts in unconventional or successful movies, not always (but very often) with renowned directors, Robert Altman (in 1998’s The Gingerbread Man) and Woody Allen (in Celebrity, the same year) included. “I wanted to use this moment that I had after GoldenEye to go against type, make less money, not become famous. Just become known as someone who showed up and could perform various things, portray different characters.”

She’s highly praising about Allen, which seems like a reminiscent of earlier times, as few talks about him now other than in conjunction with the accusations that surround him (which he has always denied). In fact, at 89, he has been recently embraced by the {Maga right