Famke Janssen isn’t afraid of a challenge. Born in the Netherlands, Janssen moved to the United States as a teen to pursue a career in modeling. Soon after, Janssen parlayed her modeling success into an acting career. 30 years later, Janssen is an international star known for her roles in GoldenEye and X-Men. Acting has taken Janssen all over the world. Ironically, the Blacklist star has never acted in Dutch.
That finally changed with Amsterdam Empire, a new crime drama from Piet Matthys, Nico Moolenaar, and Bart Uytdenhouwen. Janssen plays Betty Jonkers, a former pop star who marries Jack van Doorn (Derwig), the owner of a cannabis coffee shop empire in Amsterdam. Jack wants a divorce to pursue his affair with journalist Marjolein Hofman (Elise Schaap). Refusing to go quietly, Betty seeks revenge for Jack’s actions and promises to go after his wealth and empire.
Return to the Netherlands
Even for someone who once went toe-to-toe with James Bond, speaking in Dutch for the first time on a television show worried Janssen.
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“Even though I am Dutch and was born and raised there, I left when I was 18. How Dutch am I still? Am I really Dutch? I’m neither American nor Dutch. I’m sort of a world citizen. It gave me pause in the beginning,” Janssen tells Digital Trends. “I was a little intimidated to be very honest with you from the get-go. This is Dutch, and they [Dutch people] can be a bit tough and want to drag people down if they think they’re getting too big for themselves. In my mind, everyone was like, ‘She doesn’t even sound Dutch anymore.’ So I recorded my lines and listened back. I was very hard on myself in the learning process.”
A perfectionist by nature, Janssen quickly picked up the language. Much to her surprise, the character’s cultural differences, not the language, became her toughest task. In the show, Betty is an outcast, an aging star who now has to stand alone and defend her reputation. While Janssen is nothing like Betty, the Taken star could relate to the themes of isolation and redemption.
“She’s [Betty] so different from anyone else on that show. She was her own little island, and I think that helped me enormously because I felt that as someone who was born and raised and left at a young age,” Janssen explained. “I didn’t really fit in the same anymore, and Betty didn’t fit in. It’s fun what you can learn from your characters. It’s a two-way street. In this case, I think there were a lot of different things that I was experiencing either as Betty or myself that I could learn from. It was great.
The status of superhero culture
In 2000, Janssen starred in what would be her defining role, X-Men. Janssen played Jean Grey, a telekinetic who became one of the most powerful mutants and an integral member of the X-Men. Superhero movies existed before X-Men, but the entire business did not depend on their success. X-Men, and two years later, Spider-Man, planted the seeds for the superhero revolution that would dominate pop culture for the next two decades.
Even though Janssen has not played Jean Grey since 2014, her name is constantly mentioned in Marvel rumors. That speculation only intensified when several of her X-Men co-stars — including Patrick Stewart and Ian McKellen — joined the cast of Avengers: Doomsday. Janssen has stated that Marvel never contacted her to reprise her X-Men character. Still, that won’t stop passionate fans from asking Janssen about a potential return.
“It doesn’t really matter what I talk about. Ultimately, one question about that [X-Men] always gets asked,” Janssen explains. “A lot of people watch those movies. Those comics have been around for so long. They’ve had such an enormous influence on people.”
Being associated primarily with one role, despite crafting a career filled with dozens of characters, can be frustrating. It’s taken some time, but Janssen has eventually come to terms with superhero culture, especially after meeting and speaking to fans at conventions.
“What I love about having done those comic-cons is, once you get to know the real fans and the people who’ve been reading these comic books and been keeping these franchises alive, you realize it’s about people feeling like they’re outsiders,” Janssen said. “They don’t fit in. I think that’s probably the reason why these movies have been around for so long.
“At the time when we started doing our X-Men movie, the emphasis became that they are normal people. They just happen to have superpowers, but they’re normal people who don’t feel like they belong in society. Who doesn’t feel like they don’t belong? Everyone feels like an outsider to a certain extent in different ways.”
Janssen returns to her streaming roots at Netflix
The streaming wars have dominated television for nearly a decade. In the early 2010s, the only major studio to embrace streaming was Netflix, which started to dip its toe into original programming. One of Netflix’s first hits was Hemlock Grove, a horror series depicting the residents and strange occurrences of the titular town.
Janssen starred in Hemlock Grove, and her prowess helped legitimize the series and raise its profile within the television ecosystem. Janssen credits her busy lifestyle as to why she supported the binge-model release strategy right away.
“I’ve never had a normal life where I am home to watch a show at a certain time. I’ve been on the road my whole life, so this suits me very well,” Janssen said about streaming. “This is how people are going to do it in the privacy of their own home, where you can have the best sound system. You can stop and start whenever you want to.”
Netflix has also embraced international television, championing hits such as Lupin, Money Heist, and La Palma. The global series that changed everything is the South Korean thriller Squid Game, Netflix’s most-watched show of all time. Subtitles were once stigmatized in foreign television. Now, subtitles are widely accepted, with many viewers even preferring to keep them on for their native shows. Janssen is hopeful that viewers will have an appetite for Amsterdam Empire, a Dutch show.
“What I particularly love at this moment, and where I think Amsterdam Empire fits in so well, is the authenticity aspect of it,” Janssen explained. “Since Squid Game, all of a sudden, there’s an appetite for Korean, Chinese, Danish, and Dutch [shows]. Everyone is just starting to watch more authentic shows in their own language with subtitles.”
From starring in a music video to designing her own costumes, Janssen is excited to show a different side of her personality in Amsterdam Empire. Janssen took her executive producer credit seriously, collaborating with the show’s creatives on nearly every aspect of the Netflix production. It might have taken longer than expected, but Janssen is finally home, and she’s ready for her next chapter.
Amsterdam Empire is now streaming on Netflix.
