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Famke Janssen arrives dressed for her photoshoot at the Covent Garden hotel in a manner that mirrors her character, Betty, from the new Netflix crime drama Amsterdam Empire – delicate and floral yet structured and short, accompanied by long school socks. Is the look alluring in a sardonic way, or is it irony expressed through fashion? We devote considerable time, in various ways, discussing being objectified, the beauty myths of the male-dominated society, and the side effects of the self – essentially, sexism. Janssen has appeared in more than 60 films during a 30-year career, and before that, she worked as a model. There is much to discuss.

I appear strong, I truly am strong. I come from a lineage of powerful women.

Amsterdam Empire marks the first production she has ever made in her home country, the Netherlands, and the first time she has performed in Dutch. Parts have arisen in the past, not least because she has two sisters in the business – Marjolein Beumer, an actress, and Antoinette Beumer, a director – but nothing was quite right. “Then Netflix came to me with this pitch – it’s The War of the Roses combined with The Sopranos,” she explains. Well, partly: that’s certainly the story – Jack, played by Jacob Derwig, is the mastermind of a cannabis empire that is legal on the surface but not underneath. He kicks off the series by walking out on Betty, a show-stopping beauty and briefly famous pop star of the past, who will absolutely not go down without a fight.

It’s a new era for Netflix: if they produce a show in a foreign location, it’s authentic to that locale. Amsterdam Empire seems very original, unprecedented. The dialogue are exhilaratingly blunt. It’s risqué but so frank and un-euphemised that, even while viewing the divorce play out in a strip club, on a mechanical bull in the shape of a large penis, you’re not remotely reminded of sex.

But the core is the subtle shift of loyalty – Betty appears in the show as an eccentric individual who has been discarded, while Jack’s the leading man with a new love interest. She’s the one who consistently, and fully, gains the room. “We have no information about Betty,” Janssen states; “we know everything about Jack. So I said, ‘It’s not a balanced competition.’ The fact that Betty doesn’t have a child, she has no family member. She doesn’t have a friend. She has a dog that she has to take back, and she has her husband. When I studied that character, I thought: ‘OK, I will do what I can to make this fully developed. If I don’t get it on the page, I’m going to incorporate it in my acting.” In numerous aspects, it’s the job she was born to do – “I’ve made a career out of playing women who are underwritten.”

Janssen was born in Amstelveen, near Amsterdam, into a challenging life that she describes vaguely but doesn’t sugarcoat. “From a early age, we were left to take care of ourselves,” she recalls. “There were a lot of things happening, there was drama. I realised, if I fail to care for myself, this will not turn out well.” She was viewed as the intellectual one of the three sisters, so wasn’t encouraged to do anything creative, and eventually studying economics, “because I had a instructor, who told to the students, to everyone, ‘Oh, girls don’t understand science.’ A significant period of my life were disrupted, just to prove this man wrong.”

She started work early, taking whatever work she could get – distributing newspapers, working in bars, in shops, “whatever to earn my own money, to have my own independence”. She left home at 17, to become a model, and “it was only leaving the Netherlands, coming to the US, that I learned to dream, figured out to create what I wanted to create. It was a completely new culture, where I had approval.”

When you examine pictures of those modelling days – there’s a bathing suit session with Janssen and Elle Macpherson that is so typically 80s it’s like going back in time – there is something culturally contradictory about them. The appearance was incredibly strong. This was prior to “heroin chic” and thinness; the archetype was physically robust, yet at the same time, there seemed to be an unspoken rule of, “Please, no one ask these women to speak anything, they’re more effective when you only observe at them.”

“For me,” she explains, “that’s been the greatest challenge, because I’m so assertive. I appear strong, I am strong. I originate from a heritage of strong women. I’m not going to play some idiot in front of a male producer or director to get what I want. But I feel that might be the way certain individuals would approach it – because if not, if you go in too forcefully there, you know you’re being labelled at every step, and you don’t get anything.”

Janssen needed to put distance between the modelling and her acting ambitions, and enrolled at Columbia University in New York to pursue creative writing and literature, with film studies as a secondary focus. She didn’t get her first acting role until she was 28, and then GoldenEye arrived in 1995, when she was 30. Xenia Onatopp was, maybe, not an obvious choice of role. “I was quite conscious,” she notes, “of the dangers of being a model-turned-actor-turned-Bond girl. I felt ‘Bond girl’ was such a demeaning term. But I reasoned: ‘I have little to lose; if I do this, I’m going to go all the way.’ So I came up with a lot of the elements that are now in the film, because I aimed to make a memorable character, not play her the way she was written.”

Onatopp has been so thoroughly examined, not just as a moment of Bond girl resurgence in the franchise – a move away from interchangeable damsels towards women who could crush you with their thighs, and whose only concern would be if they snagged their tights – but also for what, if any, message it made about female empowerment as dominance, cruelty as a baton transferring from the man to the woman. It got a bit intense, put it that way. Surely Onatopp was always conceived as a woman who gets off on thigh-squeezing men to death?

“I introduced a lot that was absent from the script,” says Janssen. “Things like the way she’s so ecstatic. I was raised on Bond movies, because my dad enjoyed them, and so I always thought of them as comedies, as tongue-in-cheek. I thought: ‘Let me make this character memorable.’ I took a risk. It could have not worked out. I don’t know where I got the confidence.”

It was a success, undoubtedly – but the consequence was that “after that, the offers that were coming in were every 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.”

It wasn’t what she desired, and she struggled instead to get a part that genuinely wasn’t very large, in the 1997 neo-noir City of Industry, starring Harvey Keitel. “It’s an U.S. woman. She works in a supermarket. She has limited funds. She lives in this modest little house. It took a lot to get that role, because Harvey at first only perceived this glamorous person, with my background – experienced, whatever. He failed to recognize me, he saw this.” She motions at herself, and of course I understand what she implies – star-power personified. “And I reflected: ‘But that’s far from my background.’ I came to the audition dressed like a checkout girl, believing: avoid judging a book by its cover, let me pursue this, it’s intriguing.”

From there, she progressed to modest parts in left-field or successful movies, not always (but very often) with renowned directors, Robert Altman (in 1998’s The Gingerbread Man) and Woody Allen (in Celebrity, the identical year) among them. “I wanted to leverage this moment that I had after GoldenEye to defy expectations, make less money, avoid becoming famous. Simply become known as someone who showed up and could do different things, play different characters.”

She’s very complimentary about Allen, which seems like a reminiscent of earlier times, as few talks about him now except in connection with the accusations that involve him (which he has always denied). In fact, at 89, he has been recently embraced by the {Maga right