Famke Janssen played Bond Girl Xenia Onatopp in 1995’s GoldenEye opposite Pierce Brosnan.
Famke Janssen broke her ribs while filming GoldenEye.
The 61-year-old actress played Bond Girl Xenia Onatopp in the 1995 action-thriller movie, which starred Pierce Brosnan, 73, as the iconic British spy, and shooting the flirty and tense bathhouse showdown scene between the pair caused pain for Janssen.
Per The Hollywood Reporter, she said during a masterclass conversation at Mediterrane Film Festival in Malta last week: “From the moment I got the part, I just thought, ‘I’m going for broke. I don’t care. I am going to give it my all and work as hard as I can on making sure this character is going to be as memorable as possible.’
“So I threw myself into it. That scene was very difficult but also very liberating.”
Janssen added: “I did break my ribs during that scene, by the way. The walls were padded, and Pierce was meant to throw me against the wall.
“I told him, ‘Pierce, it’s so hard to act out this pain, so just throw me against the wall.’ He said, ‘No, no, no. I don’t want to hurt you.’
“I said, ‘Don’t worry about it, the walls are padded.’ Famous last words.”
The entertainer was left with broken ribs after Brosnan threw her against a wall during the scene.
But Janssen did not realise how serious her injury was until months later.
She recalled: “I couldn’t speak at that point. They had to stop filming for a moment because they didn’t know what was going on. I couldn’t breathe. I couldn’t do anything.
“I didn’t learn, by the way, until I came back to New York – we shot for six months – that I had broke a rib. We just continued filming. They didn’t know.”
A “pseudo psychic person” was called to work on Janssen’s body, but she could not say if the star had broken ribs.
But Janssen added: “She predicted that I was going to work with Woody Allen, which is so crazy.
“She said, ‘I can see Woody Allen smiling at you,’ and then probably within a year or two, I worked with him.”
Janssen starred in 90-year-old Allen’s 1998 comedy-drama, Celebrity.
Last November, Janssen admitted she feared being a Bond Girl could have ruined her career.
She told the Guardian newspaper: “I was very aware of the pitfalls of being a model-turned-actor-turned-Bond girl. I thought ‘Bond girl’ was such a demeaning term.
“But I thought: ‘I have nothing to lose; if I do this, I’m going to go all the way.’ So I came up with a lot of the things that are now in the film, because I wanted to make a memorable character, not play her the way she was written.”
Janssen added: “I brought a lot that was not on the page. Things like the way she’s so orgasmic. I grew up on Bond movies because my dad used to like them, and so I always thought of them as comedies, as tongue-in-cheek.
“I thought: ‘Let me make this character unforgettable.’ I went for broke. It easily could have failed. I don’t know where I got the confidence.”
Famke Janssen broke ribs on set of GoldenEye
