Once a Bond girl, always a Bond girl, but Famke Janssen has other plans.
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Cruel, Hedy Lamarr eyes, diamond-cut facial lines, dominatrix body language, Amazon figure-- you're not about to forget Famke Janssen once she slinks onto your brainpan, as the Russian agent with the ThighMaster scissor-lock in GoldenEye, as the harried white-trash wife of a doomed heister in City of Industry, or as Kenneth Branagh's rummy Southern ex-wife in Robert Altman's John Grisham-scripted The Gingerbread Man.
After you're a Bond girl, the question is always, What next?" comments Jannsen. "What every single person before me has done next is go into some kind of B-movie, with a gun. I tried to avoid that, and look, I got to work with somebody like Altman. And I got to use Southern dialect, so the next time someone says, 'Oh, is she Russian?' I can say, 'Look, go watch a couple of movies.'"
Dutch-born and completely accent-less, Janssen is, in case you missed this, very clear about what her game plan calls for: "I'm extremely driven--I'm going to have the acting career I set out to have, goddamn it," she states. Nudity is not on the scoresheet: "I've never done a nude scene. If I were a European actress, fine--they take their clothes off right and left, they go to the bathroom on-screen, it's all normal. That's European film. American film is about exploiting women--some of the time. I didn't want to be typecast as a Bond girl, an ex-model, so I've just avoided the whole thing altogether. If Stanley Kubrick came to me, and said, 'Please, play this character and there's one scene where it's absolutely necessary,' I'd do it. But that guy's a fucking genius!"
In the interest of covering all bases, Janssen has balanced her Altman film with a glossy monster movie--next year's Deep Rising. "You have to play the Hollywood game--you look to the independents for characters to play, and every now and then you do a big Hollywood movie, which these days means an action film, for the money and the visibility. Deep Rising is about a giant octopus attacking a cruise ship. I play a kleptomaniac. I steal a necklace, it's the only reason I'm on that boat. The other characters disappear, and then we find a massacre of dead bloody people-stuff. I couldn't tell you how the octopus does it--I never saw the octopus, I just saw the results. In that kind of movie, you never really have a clue. You come in and go, 'Where are we now? Fine, I'll just act scared.'"
Bond, indie, Grisham/Altman, big-budget monster pic--what would the Janssen plan call for next? It all makes perfect sense. In addition to a couple more indies, Janssen is starring in the Woody Allen fall '97 project.
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Michael Atkinson