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Famke Janssen appears dressed for her photo session at the Covent Garden hotel in a style that mirrors her character, Betty, from the latest Netflix thriller series Amsterdam Empire – delicate and floral yet tailored and short, accompanied by long school socks. Does the outfit alluring in a ironic way, or is it irony expressed through fashion? We devote considerable time, in various ways, talking about being objectified, the beauty myths of the patriarchy, and the side effects of the self – essentially, sexism. Janssen has starred in over sixty films during a 30-year career, and before that, she was a model. There is much to discuss.

I look strong, I truly am strong. I hail from a lineage of powerful women.

Amsterdam Empire represents the first production she has undertaken in her home country, the Netherlands, and the first time she has acted in Dutch. Parts have arisen in the past, not least because she has two sisters in the industry – Marjolein Beumer, an actor, and Antoinette Beumer, a filmmaker – but none was quite right. “Then Netflix came to me with this pitch – it’s The War of the Roses combined with The Sopranos,” she says. OK, partly: that’s definitely the story – Jack, portrayed by Jacob Derwig, is the mastermind of a cannabis business that is legal on the outside but illegal beneath. He starts the series by leaving Betty, a show-stopping beauty and one-hit-wonder pop star of yore, 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 true to that place. Amsterdam Empire seems very original, unprecedented. The dialogue are exhilaratingly blunt. It’s raunchy but so frank and un-euphemised that, even while watching the divorce play out in a strip club, on a bucking bronco in the shape of a giant penis, you’re not remotely reminded of sex.

But the beating heart is the gradual shift of allegiance – Betty appears in the show as an eccentric character who has been cast aside, while Jack’s the leading man with a new love interest. She’s the one who steadily, and completely, wins the room. “We know nothing about Betty,” Janssen states; “we are fully aware about Jack. So I said, ‘It’s not a fair fight.’ The reality that Betty lacks a child, she doesn’t have family member. She doesn’t have a friend. She has a dog that she has to steal, and she has her husband. When I studied that character, I considered: ‘OK, I will do what I can to make this well-rounded. If I don’t get it on the page, I’m going to put it in my acting.” In many ways, it’s the role she was born to do – “I’ve built a career out of portraying women who are poorly developed.”

Janssen was born in Amstelveen, near Amsterdam, into a hardscrabble existence that she explains vaguely but doesn’t gloss. “From a young age, we were forced to fend for ourselves,” she says. “There were a lot of things going on, there was turmoil. I understood, if I don’t look after myself, this will not turn out well.” She was viewed as the academic one of the three sisters, so wasn’t encouraged to do anything creative, and eventually studying economics, “because I had a science teacher, who said to the students, to everyone, ‘Oh, girls can’t grasp science.’ A whole few years of my life were disrupted, just to prove this man wrong.”

She began working young, accepting any job she could find – distributing newspapers, working in bars, in shops, “anything to earn my own money, to have my own independence”. She moved out at 17, to become a model, and “it was only departing the Netherlands, coming to the US, that I discovered to dream, figured out to build what I wanted to create. It was a completely new culture, where I had permission.”

When you look at pictures of those modelling days – there’s a swimwear shoot with Janssen and Elle Macpherson that is so quintessentially 80s it’s like going back in time – there is something paradoxical about them. The look was extremely strong. This was before “heroin chic” and waifery; the archetype was fit and healthy, yet at the same time, there seemed to be an implicit expectation of, “Please, nobody ask these women to speak anything, they’re more effective when you just look at them.”

“For me,” she says, “that’s been the biggest challenge, because I’m so strong. I look strong, I am strong. I originate from a background of resilient women. I’m not going to play some idiot in front of a male producer or director to obtain what I want. But I believe that could be the way some people would go about it – because if not, if you go in too hard there, you know you’re being labelled at every step, and you won’t receive anything.”

Janssen needed to create distance between the modeling and her aspirations as an actress, and enrolled at Columbia University in New York to pursue creative writing and literature, with cinema as a secondary focus. She didn’t get her initial acting role until she was 28, and then GoldenEye arrived in 1995, when she was 30. Xenia Onatopp was, maybe, not an obvious selection of role. “I was very aware,” she says, “of the dangers of being a former model turned actress-turned-Bond girl. I thought ‘Bond girl’ was such a demeaning term. But I thought: ‘I have nothing to lose; if I do this, I’m going to give it my all.’ So I came up with a lot of the elements that are now in the film, because I wanted to make a memorable character, not portray her the way she was written.”

Onatopp has been so thoroughly examined, not just as a moment of Bond girl revival in the franchise – a shift away from similar damsels towards women who could defeat 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 power, cruelty as a baton transferring from the male to the female. It became 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 not on the page,” states Janssen. “Things like the way she’s so ecstatic. I grew up on Bond movies, because my dad used to like them, and so I always viewed them as humorous, as ironic. I decided: ‘Let me make this character unforgettable.’ I took a risk. It easily not worked out. I don’t know where I found the boldness.”

It was a success, no question – but the consequence was that “after that, the offers that were coming in were any woman with a gun, in the background. Between my name, Famke Janssen, and having played a Russian, Xenia Onatopp, they were unsure what to do with me other than make me a non-native who was bad.”

It wasn’t what she wanted, and she struggled instead to get a role 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 grocery store. She has limited funds. She lives in this modest little house. It took a lot to secure that part, because Harvey initially only perceived this glamorous person, with my history – well-travelled, and so on. 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 arrived to the audition dressed like a checkout girl, believing: don’t judge a book by its cover, let me pursue this, it’s intriguing.”

From there, she went on to small-to-middling parts in left-field or successful movies, sometimes (but very often) with sterling directors, Robert Altman (in 1998’s The Gingerbread Man) and Woody Allen (in Celebrity, the identical year) included. “I aimed to use this opportunity that I had after GoldenEye to defy expectations, earn less money, not become famous. Just become known as someone who appeared and could do different things, play different characters.”

She’s very complimentary about Allen, which seems like a blast from the past, as nobody talks about him now except in connection with the allegations that surround him (which he has consistently refuted). In fact, at 89, he has been lately embraced by the {Maga right