As casting heats up to find a new 007, Famke Janssen, who starred opposite Pierce Brosnan in 1995, Golden eyeShe recalled her nerve-wracking experience playing the role of Xenia Onatope in the famous James Bond film series.
“I became one of three, maybe four, finalists, and I was flown to London to do a screen test with Pierce Brosnan. I remember being very nervous because I had never done a screen test in my life, and this was a Russian character with an accent,” Janssen, 61, explained during an advanced chat with Vanity Fair John Ross during the Mediterranean Film Festival in Malta last week. She got the audition because she was filming a role in a Clive Barker movie Master of illusions for Bond studio MGM, and studio executives were impressed by her daily newspaper. “I didn’t sleep all night…I kind of gave up and everything [my acting coach Harold Guskin] He taught me, I took with me. The rest is history.
It was a pivotal moment for the franchise as Brosnan took on the lead role in what would be the first of four 007 sequels, and the first Bond film after a six-year hiatus. Brosnan took over from Timothy Dalton (and paved the way for Daniel Craig). It was also a coup, to say the least, for Janssen, the Dutch talent who began her career as a model before moving to New York to study creative writing and literature at Columbia University. Before joining the Bond party, she had only had a few small roles in films and TV shows, including… Fathers and sons (its penetrating role), Melrose Place and Star Trek: The Next Generation.
“I grew up watching Bond films because my father was a big fan,” continued Janssen, who was born in Amstelveen, Netherlands. “I saw what they were, but I was also very aware of how women were portrayed in the genre. As a Dutch woman coming from a family of very strong women, female empowerment was very important.” [important to me]You have colored my life in every way. I put a lot of pressure on myself in this role because I thought I didn’t want to be one of those women. This is not the way I want to start my career. I wanted it to be a stepping stone to a long-term career where I could do different things. So, I worked hard.”
Speaking of which, Ross asked Janssen about the steamy bathroom scene in which Xenia and Bond have a flirtatious yet ferocious confrontation.
“From the moment I got the role, I thought I was going to go bankrupt. I don’t care. I’m going to do everything I can and work as hard as I can to make sure this character is going to be as memorable as possible. ” “So I threw myself into it,” she explained, adding that her bravery came as a bit of a surprise considering how she grew up as a “very shy child” who would often run and hide under the bed when guests came to visit. “That scene was very difficult but also very liberating.”
And also very painful.
“By the way, I broke my ribs during that scene,” she revealed. “The walls were padded, and Pierce was supposed to throw me against the wall. I said, ‘Pierce, it’s very hard to act out this pain, so just throw me against the wall.’ And he said, ‘No, no, no. I don’t want to hurt you.’ And I said, ‘Don’t worry about it, the walls are padded.'” Famous final words.
She says Brosnan then threw Janssen against a wall, at which point she suffered broken ribs, although she did not realize the extent of the injury until months later. “I couldn’t talk at that point. They had to stop filming for a moment because they didn’t know what was happening. I couldn’t breathe. I couldn’t do anything. By the way, I didn’t learn, until I got back to New York — we filmed for six months — that I had broken a rib. We just kept filming. They didn’t know.”
Janssen said the filmmakers hired a “pseudo-spiritual person” to work on her body, and the specialist couldn’t determine whether her ribs were broken, but he had a vision of a certain filmmaker she would eventually work with.
“I figured I would work with Woody Allen, which was absolutely crazy,” said the veteran star, who landed a role opposite Kenneth Branagh in the 1998 film The Author. “She said, ‘I can see Woody Allen smiling at you,’ and then maybe within a year or two, I got to work with him.” Celebrities.
Back to Bond. Joining the franchise also presented a steep learning curve, Jansen said. “You learn very quickly from day one that there is a publicity machine behind a Bond film that is unlike any other series, not even like the X-Men,” said the actress, who plays Jean Gray in the blockbuster franchise. “Over all these years, they’ve known how to promote something. The first week of filming — I hadn’t even gotten to the set yet — they held a press conference with 800 people. [journalists] Like a feast with round tables. This was with the British press, which is notorious. I love you all but they are notoriously difficult. And immediately I said: Oh my God, this is it. This is what we will deal with. [I was playing] Like this particular character who was foreign and I was thrown into this big machine. “There was a whole stigma around it.”
Janssen said it was difficult to move from “stigma to stigma” as a model-turned-actress-turned-Bond girl.
“I was like, ‘Oh my God, what am I doing with myself and my career?’ I kept having to step out of every box I was put into. After[[Golden eyeAlthough she was very selective, she said: “It came out, it really put me in the spotlight in a way that I had never experienced before, and gave me vision and options. I turned down everything that had a gun in it, that had ‘this’ in it, that had ‘that’ in it. I waited until this project came along.” Industry City With Harvey Keitel, and that was the thing I liked because it was decadent and outside.
