Famke Janssen just finished stitching the finishing touches to her outfit.
It was a late night for the Dutch-born actress, who had just flown home to New York City from Bulgaria, where she’s filming the post-apocalyptic disaster thriller One Second After . But she allotted time to customize the herringbone jumper she’s wearing for our video call, carefully sewing shiny red butterflies across the fabric.
“We gotta make sure we see the butterflies,” Janssen tells me as we set up the camera for our conversation for Yahoo’s Unapologetically series.
It’s a fashion statement, sure, but it’s more. For Janssen, customizing her clothes is a nod to her grandmother, who sewed her childhood wardrobe, inspiring the star’s lifelong love of fashion. The butterflies are more than decoration; they’re a declaration. And in Netflix’s Amsterdam Empire , Janssen spreads her wings wider than ever, starring and, for the first time, serving as an executive producer and co-costume designer.
“I've been in this business for almost 30 years, and I've done 80 films, so I feel like I've earned that status,” says the entertainer, who has also portrayed Xenia Onatopp in GoldenEye , Jean Grey/Phoenix in the X-Men movies and Lenore Mills in Taken.
Here, Janssen opens up about “wearing many hats” while making the series — in which she plays a colorful, complex one-hit wonder pop star whose husband leaves her for his younger, pregnant mistress — and discusses unrealistic beauty standards for women, the importance of self-love and why social media isn’t for her.
