Famke Janssen is dressed for her photoshoot at the Covent Garden hotel exactly as her character, Betty, would dress in the new Netflix crime drama Amsterdam Empire – lacy and floral but tailored and mini, with long school socks. Is the look sexy in a sardonic way, or irony expressed through fashion? We spend a lot of time, one way or another, talking about objectification, the beauty myths of the patriarchy, the collateral damage of the self – sexism, basically. Janssen has been in more than 60 films across a 30-year career, and before that, she was a model. There’s a lot to talk about.
So it hardly seems the time to mention how smoking she looks; her face as flawless and cheekboney at 60 as it was nearly 30 years ago, in the 1995 James Bond film GoldenEye. It’s almost unnerving – if she were a man, I would mention it without hesitation. She puts it down to clean living: “I get judged very quickly, that I must have had work, which I haven’t. We shame women into it, and then we shame women when they do it. I support everyone’s decision to do whatever they want, it’s just not my cup of tea.”
