Actress Famke Janssen has admitted she feared being a Bond Girl could have ruined her career but she “went for broke” because she had “nothing to lose”.
Famke Janssen feared being a Bond Girl could have ruined her career.
The 61-year-old actress landed her big break in Hollywood when she was cast as Xenia Onatopp opposite Pierce Brosnan as 007 in 1995’s GoldenEye, but Famke now admits she had reservations about the role and her take on the character could easily have “failed”.
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.”
She 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’s performance in the film led to a flurry of work offers, but the actress admits the jobs were not very interesting.
She explained: “After that, the offers that were coming in were any woman with a gun, standing around.
“Between my name, Famke Janssen, and having played a Russian, Xenia Onatopp, they didn’t know what to do with me except make me a foreigner who was bad.”
However, Famke was determined not to fall into the trap of playing the same roles so she held out for parts in less high profile films.
She added: “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 do different things, play different characters.”
Famke appeared in films such as 1997’s City of Industry and Robert Altman’s The Gingerbread Man in 1998 before eventually joining the X-Men franchise in 2000 and appearing in the Taken movies opposite Liam Neeson.
However, Famke insists the one thing she won’t be doing is stripping off on Instagram in a bid to land more movie roles, saying: “I certainly was not going to do what a lot of the rest of the world and a lot of women seem to be doing, which is photographing themselves half naked on Instagram, screaming for attention. It’s just not who I am.”
Famke Janssen feared being a Bond Girl could have ruined her career
