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Famke Janssen appears outfitted for her photo session at the Covent Garden hotel in a manner that reflects her character, Betty, from the latest Netflix crime drama Amsterdam Empire – lacy and flower-patterned yet tailored and short, accompanied by long school socks. Is the look alluring in a sardonic way, or is it irony expressed through fashion? We spend considerable time, one way or another, discussing being objectified, the unrealistic beauty standards of the male-dominated society, and the side effects of the self – basically, sexism. Janssen has starred in over sixty films across a three-decade career, and prior to that, she worked as a model. There is much to discuss.

I look strong, I am strong. I come from a background of powerful women.

Amsterdam Empire represents the first production she has undertaken in her home country, the Netherlands, and the initial instance she has performed in Dutch. Roles have arisen in the past, partly 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 proposal – it’s The War of the Roses combined with The Sopranos,” she says. OK, partly: that’s certainly the narrative – Jack, played by Jacob Derwig, is the kingpin of a cannabis business that is legitimate on the outside but illegal underneath. He kicks off 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 fresh chapter for Netflix: if they make a show in a foreign location, it’s authentic to that locale. Amsterdam Empire seems highly unique, unprecedented. The conversations are remarkably blunt. It’s risqué but so direct and un-euphemised that, even while viewing the divorce unfold in a strip club, on a mechanical bull in the shape of a giant penis, you’re not at all thinking of sex.

But the beating heart is the gradual shift of allegiance – 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 completely, wins the room. “We know nothing about Betty,” Janssen states; “we know everything about Jack. So I said, ‘It’s not a fair fight.’ The fact that Betty doesn’t have a child, she doesn’t have 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 read that character, I thought: ‘OK, I will do what I can to make this fully developed. If I fail to see it on the page, I’m going to incorporate it in my acting.” In numerous aspects, 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 describes quite elliptically but doesn’t sugarcoat. “From a early age, we were left to fend for ourselves,” she recalls. “There were a lot of issues going on, there was turmoil. I understood, if I fail to care for myself, this isn’t going to end well.” She was considered the intellectual one of the three sisters, so received no support to do anything artistic, and eventually studying economics, “because I had a instructor, who told to the class, to everyone, ‘Oh, girls can’t grasp science.’ A significant period of my life were derailed, just to prove this man wrong.”

She began working early, accepting any job she could get – delivering newspapers, working in bars, in shops, “anything to make my own money, to have my own independence”. She left home at 17, to become a model, and “it was only departing the Netherlands, moving to the US, that I discovered to dream, figured out to build what I desired to create. It was a whole different culture, where I had permission.”

When you examine pictures of those modelling days – there’s a bathing suit session 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 incredibly strong. This was prior to “heroin chic” and thinness; the archetype was fit and healthy, yet at the same time, there seemed to be an unspoken rule of, “Please, nobody ask these women to say anything, they’re more effective when you only observe at them.”

“For me,” she explains, “that’s been the biggest challenge, because I’m so assertive. I appear strong, I truly 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 feel that could be the way certain individuals would approach it – because otherwise, if you come on too hard there, you know you’re being stereotyped at every turn, and you don’t get anything.”

Janssen needed to put clear blue water between the modelling and her aspirations as an actress, and enrolled at Columbia University in New York to study literature and writing, with film studies as a secondary focus. She landed her initial acting role until she was 28, and then GoldenEye came along in 1995, when she was 30. Xenia Onatopp was, perhaps, not an straightforward choice of role. “I was quite conscious,” she says, “of the pitfalls 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 take this on, I’m going to go all the way.’ So I developed a lot of the elements that are now in the film, because I aimed to make a unforgettable character, not play 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 move away from interchangeable female characters towards women who could crush you with their thighs, and whose only distress would be if they snagged their tights – but also for what, should there be, statement it made about feminism as dominance, cruelty as a symbol transferring from the male to the female. It got a bit heated, to say the least. Surely Onatopp was always written as a woman who derives pleasure on thigh-crushing men to death?

“I brought a lot that was absent from the script,” says 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 memorable.’ I went for broke. It could have not worked out. I don’t know where I found the boldness.”

It was a success, no question – but the knock-on effect was that “after that, the roles that were coming in were every 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 villainous.”

It wasn’t what she desired, and she fought instead to get a part that truly wasn’t very large, in the 1997 crime film City of Industry, featuring Harvey Keitel. “It’s an American woman. She works in a supermarket. She has limited funds. She lives in this modest little house. It required a lot to secure that part, because Harvey at first just saw this elegant person, with my history – well-travelled, whatever. He didn’t see me, he saw this.” She gestures at herself, and naturally I understand what she means – star-power embodied. “And I thought: ‘But that’s far from my background.’ I came to the tryout attired like a cashier, believing: don’t judge a book by its cover, let me go for this, it’s intriguing.”

From there, she progressed to modest parts in left-field or breakout movies, not always (but very often) with sterling directors, Robert Altman (in 1998’s The Gingerbread Man) and Woody Allen (in Celebrity, the same year) included. “I wanted to use this moment that I had after GoldenEye to defy expectations, earn less money, not become famous. Simply become known as someone who showed up and could do various things, portray different characters.”

She’s highly praising about Allen, which feels like a reminiscent of earlier times, as nobody discusses him now except in conjunction with the allegations that involve him (which he has always denied). In fact, at 89, he has been recently adopted by the {Maga right