High performance
After decades in Hollywood, Famke Janssen returns to her native language for Netflix’s Amsterdam Empire. She tells DQ how the role reconnected her with her past, and looks ahead to what the future may hold.
Across an acting career spanning more than 30 years, Dutch star Famke Janssen’s varied path that has led her through the Taken trilogy, Hansel & Gretel: Witch Hunters, The Faculty and House on Haunted Hill to early Netflix original series Hemlock Grove, legal drama How to Get Away with Murder and BBC conspiracy thriller The Capture.
It’s a route she has very much chosen herself, having decided early on that she didn’t want to be pinned down by her breakout role in James Bond feature GoldenEye, or arguably her most iconic part – as Jean Grey in numerous X-Men films made between 2000 and 2014.
“It’s mostly about challenging myself,” she tells DQ at the Monte-Carlo TV Festival. “My goal has never been to be the most famous, highest-paid actor. That was never the journey for me. I want to be taken seriously. I want to have different roles. I want to have variety in my choices and be seen as someone who can play different things. I could have chosen a different path after GoldenEye. I could have taken any movie with a gun and just made that a career, and I chose not to.”
Just to emphasise that point, Janssen’s latest role in upcoming Netflix series Amsterdam Empire marks her first time playing a character who speaks her native Dutch.
She portrays Betty, the wife of Jack van Doorn, the rich and notorious founder of coffee shop empire Jackal. Jack has had to fight his entire career against criminals, competitors and absurd Dutch laws to become the biggest of them all. But when his affair with a well-known journalist comes to light, it turns out his most dangerous enemy has been living under his roof all this time: the betrayed Betty, an ex-pop diva who knows all his weak spots and secrets and will not rest until she has taken everything from him.
The show is described as an “extravagant crime drama full of glamour and grime at the heart of the Amsterdam cannabis scene,” and the early teaser trailer certainly positions Betty as a woman scorned and out for revenge.
“She’s angry because her husband cheated on her with a younger woman and has impregnated her – and she never had a child when she wanted one, so it’s extra painful,” Janssen says of her character. “He wants to settle out of court and just give her some money; pay her off, basically. But she has a different agenda at that point to take over the empire, to destroy him, anything.”
When she took on the role, Janssen was clear with showrunner Nico Moolenaar that Betty shouldn’t be reduced to an “angry woman” for the whole series, which despite the explosive first-look trailer is a family story at its core.
“He [Jack] has two children from another marriage and his ex-wife also starts factoring into the story, so there are multiple different [angles]. Then it’s very much about the weed industry and the lightness and darkness both in people and that industry, which is very complicated,” Janssen continues. “It’s not as easy to understand as most people think. Most people have always thought, ‘Oh, weed is legalised in the Netherlands,’ but it’s not, actually. You can buy a certain amount in a coffee shop but the making of it, the growing of it, is illegal. It’s a whole complicated thing. [The show] delves into it and you see all different aspects to it.”
It was Moolenaar (Undercover) who first approached Janssen to star in the series. She had previously turned down several other roles in Dutch shows that she didn’t feel were the right fit, but Amsterdam Empire proved to be the perfect project, offering her the chance to return to Netflix at a time when non-English-language dramas are continuing to find global audiences on the streamer.
“Before, Americans were very much against anything with subtitles. They were like, ‘That’s not going to happen.’ But since Squid Game, you now see everyone is open to watching anything in different languages,” she notes. “I’ve worked with Netflix several times, and it’s wonderful to have a big studio like that behind you. It felt like the right moment to go back and do it.”
Playing Betty also presented Janssen with a number of unique challenges on set. As her character is a singer who had a one-hit wonder called Forever Pour Toujours in the 1990s, Janssen had to learn to dance and sing for a music video that appears in the series. She is also among the show’s exec producers, and had a hand in designing Betty’s costumes.
Meanwhile, performing in her native language for the first time was a strange experience for the star, who left her Netherlands home when she was 18 to become a model, travelling the world before eventually settling in the US and becoming an actor in her late 20s.
“Of course, I speak to my family all the time and I visit a couple of times a year,” she says. “I speak it [Dutch], not fluently, but English is what I speak every single day of my life – my whole adult life. So to act in my native tongue was odd.
“It was challenging in the beginning, mostly because I was a little bit insecure about it. I thought, ‘Oh God, eyes will be on me going, ‘Can she still speak Dutch?’ Grammatically I make mistakes now because I translate from English into Dutch. My younger sister said to me, ‘Thank God you’re not writing the show, because that would be tough.’”
Janssen even found that speaking in Dutch in front of the camera changed her performance, as she reverted to “Dutch Famke.” “It gives you so much,” she says. “It’s so interesting because, in English, I’m a different person than I am in Dutch. It automatically brings out a different part of yourself. But the character was so fun and kind of spunky and outgoing. That’s very different from the young, very shy person that I was. So it was good to have that.”
Looking back on her early career, Janssen reveals that she didn’t even really want to be a model – “I just wanted to get out of Holland, I guess.” She was studying economics, but wanted away, and got her ticket out of the Netherlands when she was discovered by a modelling scout walking through Amsterdam.
Making money while travelling the world and seeing different cultures opened up a new life for Janssen. “I was absolutely enthralled by it,” she says. That then brought her to the US, where she retired “at the height of my modelling career” to pursue acting.
“But I told one person [about her acting ambitions] and her response was so negative. She said, ‘Oh, yeah, you and everyone else.’ Then I thought, ‘OK, I won’t tell anyone else. Let me just do it.’ Then I went back to school to Columbia University [in New York], studied there, and I started taking acting lessons.”
Since then, Janssen has even stepped behind the camera to write and direct a feature film, 2011’s Bringing Up Bobby. It tells the story of a con artist who moves her son to a conservative neighbourhood in Oklahoma to build a better future, but it doesn’t take long for her past to catch up with her, while Bobby’s behaviour causes them further problems.
Though the star is keen to continue producing, if she were to direct again in the future, “it would have to really be the right thing,” she says. “You have to give up so much, and it’s the only thing you can do [at that time]. At least with producing, you can develop and do different things at the same time.
“With Bringing Up Bobby, I gave up acting for three years to get that thing off the ground because it kept falling apart and money fell out and actors fell out. Now, more than ever, the whole route of independent filmmaking has just become so difficult, so probably not in the independent sphere. It would have to somehow work out a different way.”
As for her future on screen, would she be interested in returning to the kinds of blockbusters that marked her early acting career, with the X-Men being lined up for reboot as part of Marvel Cinematic Universe? “As an actor, yeah,” she adds, “if the right one came along.”
Like Amsterdam Empire? Watch this! Suggested by AI, selected by DQ
Red Light: A Dutch-Belgian series that explores the dark and complex world of human trafficking, prostitution and organised crime between Antwerp and Amsterdam.
Mocro Maffia: Across six seasons on streamer Videoland, this Dutch series follows the story of three friends who transition from petty to serious crime, rising to control the entire cocaine trade in the Netherlands.
The Outlaws: A British crime comedy about seven strangers from very different backgrounds who are sentenced to complete community service together, and soon find themselves involved in a criminal turf war.
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tagged in: Amsterdam Empire, Famke Janssen, Netfilx, Nico Moolenaar