A Woman You Should Meet: Famke Janssen

Famke Janssen has a kind of other-worldly aesthetic to her. With her dazzling face and statuesque height (she did work as a model in the beginning of her career) she’s hard to ignore. Best known for her roles as Dr. Jean Grey in the X-Men franchise, Xenia Onatopp in GoldenEye and her newest role on the popular Netflix series Hemlock Grove, Janssen has been working against being typecast for most of her 20 years as an actress. Now, as the vampiric matriarch Olivia Godfrey, she’s tapping into her bad girl side.

Don’t forget to our watch our video interview with Janssen talking about being seductive as an actress.

In the new season, we’ve seen your character Olivia Godfrey go through a huge change, most noticeably in her wardrobe.

Yes. Very true, she’s no longer dressed in white.

What does that say about the character?

She’s no longer virgin. I know that’s a shock because we all knew Olivia was a virgin after 400 years of holding out, she finally did it [laughs]. We just felt that it was in the novel, in Brian McGreery’s novel the character of Olivia was always dressed in white and I thought it was great and it served its purpose perfectly for the first season. We decided at that time to go for old, different decades in the clothing because she had been alive for so long. And then we decided that where she’s at at the beginning of season two, it just would have been inappropriate. She’s in dire states, she’s no longer living at her estate, she’s no longer in charge of the white tower, her son is no longer talking to her, it’s just so many upheavals and problems that she has to face that getting up in the morning and being dressed in white with a cane…it just wasn’t working so we went for more of a earth-tone colour palate.

How important do you think wardrobe is to a person when they’re trying to assert who they are?

Very. I mean, to think about yourself when you wake up in the morning and the way you dress is how people perceive you and how you feel about yourself and all of that. I get very much involved with costume designers in wardrobe.

With all the changes she went through, what was your favourite part about playing her this season as opposed to last season?

Not doing karaoke [laughs]. Really not doing karaoke. I liked that we saw a more vulnerable side. What I especially liked is – because I’m vulnerable myself – is playing a character who is not used to being vulnerable where it’s like ‘oh, I don’t like this. I have emotions, what am I supposed to do with that?’ That part of it was certainly fun to play around with.

You seem to be drawn to characters that have a supernatural edge to them. Do you enjoy playing these types of characters?

Just to set that straight, I don’t think they see me as quirky, I wish they saw how quirky I really am but yes I do think they see me in a very specific way and everybody gets type cast. It’s very much part of what we all do, the way you enter a room, the way you look, the way you’re perceived, whatever. So much of the acting world of how you’re going to be cast and what you’re going to be playing character-wise, I feel extremely privileged in the 20 years that I’ve been in the film business that I’ve gotten to play different characters. Some of them have been not seen by anyone because they were little independent films but none the less I got to do them and I got to play in comedies and dramas and any kind of genre imaginable but for the bigger things I get typecast in a specific role and it’s just my job to try to make each one of those characters as different as possible from the next.

Just going back a little bit to wardrobe, do you have a favourite one that you’ve worked in that you feel has really bolstered the character you were playing?

I think both in Hemlock Grove and when I played Ava Moore in Nip/TuckI felt that the wardrobe was so specific to the character and so well designed by the costume designers. Both those characters Ava and Olivia are so into the details of everything that they would never be seen unless a dress was cut perfectly to her body and everything like that. I really like that, but that’s very different from some of the other characters I’ve played where none of that comes into play at all, but it makes you much more aware of the clothing when it’s that tightly fit to your body.

What do you think about Olivia’s mothering techniques?

I think she should go to school for that. I think there should be a school for people like Olivia, just to teach them how to really mother. I think she’s trying and I applaud her for trying but she’s not very good at it.

How do you prepare yourself for the different scenes that you’re playing when in the first season Olivia was so powerful and so in charge of everyone and and now she has more empathy in her?

It’s interesting, I certainly have both characteristics, I’m very much a control freak but I’m also much more vulnerable than the Olivia that we saw in the first season. It was just accessing different parts of myself and they’re much more extreme in her so it’s just going a thousand, billion times more than in my own life kind of thing.

What do you think of Netflix releasing entire seasons of shows in one day?

I think it’s the best thing that ever happened. I think it’s so great. It’s just amazing that no one thought of it before. It’s all about timing and it was the perfect time. Everybody was ready for it. It works, it’s how we’re ready for that now. We have every possible device with us at all times to watch anything we want on. It’s catering to that particular lifestyle is the perfect thing to do. It’s how I watch everything. I’ve never had a TV and watched a series on a regular basis that I have to tune into every Thursday night or anything. I just don’t have the lifestyle. So for me, this is perfect, for all my friends and the people I know this is exactly what their viewing habits are. They are in control of when and how they want to watch something.