Famke Janssen Gives Clear Answer About Returning to James Bond or X-Men
Will the original Jean Grey return to the Marvel Universe? Could the woman who played Xenia Onatopp play a different character in a new James Bond movie? Beloved actress Famke Janssen says that those big franchise days are probably behind her and that when it comes to certain movies, there's one consistent pattern.
"Honestly, they kill me in almost everything I do," Janssen tells Men's Journal. "I mean, they've been creative on how to bring me back in ways where you thought, oh wait, maybe she's back. But I've died in so many different ways." So, as much as the actress is grateful for her time with those films, she is very much focused on the present, which includes her new Netflix show, Amsterdam Empire, a Dutch crime thriller in which she's not only an actor but also an executive producer.
Amsterdam Empire is a sometimes funny, sometimes gripping crime thriller all about Betty Jonkers (Janssen), a one-hit wonder pop star, who finds that her cannabis "coffee shop" mogul husband (Jacob Derwig) has been cheating on her. Revenge, and then a murder mystery, is the name of the game after that. Amsterdam Empire all takes place in and around Amsterdam's real-life districts, in which weed has been legal for decades.
For Janssen, although she is Dutch, returning to film this series was a strange kind of homecoming. In fact, coming back to the Netherlands for Amsterdam Empire represents a moment that she's still "processing," and that returning to where she was from made her feel like an outsider, kind of like a certain mutant she used to play.
"I don't belong anywhere really," Janssen says. "I've lived in the States for a really long time, but I'm not from here. I go back to my own culture that I don't recognize anymore because I haven't lived there for so long. I feel very much like an outsider. It's probably the reason why the X-Men movies, and the comics too, have been around for so long. It's all about people who feel like they don't belong."
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Janssen also explains that from her first big TV role of the metamorph Kamala Star Trek: The Next Generation, to the James Bond film GoldenEye, to the X-Men, she's always had to take control of her characters, and make more of each of them on her own. Which was also something she wanted to make sure of on Amsterdam Empire.
"Throughout my career, I've been asked to play characters that were underwritten," Janssen explains. "And so, I had to layer those characters in the best possible way to make them more dimensional."
Does this mean she's ready to return to any of those franchises again, whether it be Star Trek, X-Men, or Bond? For now, the answer is probably not. Janssen is still kicking ass, doing what she wants to do, on her own terms.
"I never look back in life," she says. "I'm very keen to move forward, to learn to grow. I'm not looking to revisit anything."