Famke Janssen on Nerve-Wracking Bond Audition, Breaking Ribs During Pierce Brosnan Fight Scene

As the casting process heats up to find a new 007, Famke Janssen, who starred opposite Pierce Brosnan in 1995’s GoldenEye, has recalled her nerve-wracking audition to land the part as Xenia Onatopp in the iconic James Bond franchise.

“I became one of three, maybe four, finalists, and I was flown to London for a screen test with Pierce Brosnan. I remember being so nervous because I’d never done a screen test in my life, and this was a Russian character with an accent,” Janssen, 61, explained during a masterclass conversation with Vanity Fair’s John Ross during the Mediterrane Film Festival in Malta last week. She landed the audition as she had been filming a role in Clive Barker’s Lord of Illusions for Bond studio MGM, and studio executives had been impressed with her dailies. “I didn’t sleep the whole night. … I just sort of surrendered, and everything [my acting coach Harold Guskin] taught me, I took with me. And the rest is history.”

It was a pivotal moment for the franchise as Brosnan was stepping into the lead role for what would be his first of four 007 installments, and the first Bond film following a six-year hiatus. Brosnan took over from Timothy Dalton (and paved the way for Daniel Craig). It was also a coup, to say the least, for Janssen, a Dutch talent who started her career as a model before moving to New York to study creative writing and literature at Columbia University. Prior to landing the Bond gig, she had done only a handful of bit parts in films and TV shows, including Fathers & Sons (her breakout role), Melrose Place and Star Trek: The Next Generation.

“I grew up watching Bond movies because my dad was a very big fan of them,” continued Janssen, who was born in Amstelveen, Netherlands. “So I had seen what they were, but I also was very aware of how women were portrayed in that genre. As a Dutch woman coming out of a family of very strong women with female empowerment being something that was very [important to me], it’s really kind of colored my life in every way. I put so much pressure on myself in this role because I thought, I don’t want to be one of those women. That’s not how I want to start my career. I wanted it to be a launching pad for a career that has longevity where I can do different things. So, I worked hard.”

Speaking of, Ross asked Janssen about the steamy bathhouse scene during which Xenia and Bond face off in an encounter that is both flirty and ferocious.

“From the moment I got the part, I thought just thought, ‘I’m going for broke. I don’t care. I am going to give it my all and work as hard as I can on making sure this character is going to be as memorable as possible.’ So I threw myself into it,” she explained, adding that her fearlessness came as a bit of a surprise considering how she grew up “as a very, very shy” kid who would often run and hide under a bed when guests came over to visit. “That scene was very difficult but also very liberating.”

And also very painful.

“I did break my ribs during that scene, by the way,” she revealed. “The walls were padded, and Pierce was meant to throw me against the wall. I told him, ‘Pierce, it’s so hard to act out this pain so just throw me against the wall.’ He said, ‘No, no, no. I don’t want to hurt you.’ I said, ‘Don’t worry about it, the walls are padded.’ Famous last words.”

Brosnan then threw Janssen up against the wall, she says, at which point she sustained broken ribs, though it wasn’t until months later that she realized the extent of the injury. “I couldn’t speak at that point. They had to stop filming for a moment because they didn’t know what was going on. I couldn’t breathe. I couldn’t do anything. I didn’t learn, by the way, until I came back to New York — we shot for six months — that I had broke a rib. We just continued filming. They didn’t know.”

Janssen said that filmmakers had hired a “pseudo psychic person” to work on her body, and the specialist wasn’t able to determine that she had broken ribs but did have a vision of a particular filmmaker she would eventually work with.

“She predicted that I was going to work with Woody Allen, which is so crazy. She said, ‘I can see Woody Allen smiling at you,’ and then probably within a year or two, I worked with him,” said the veteran star who landed a role opposite Kenneth Branagh in the auteur’s 1998 film Celebrity.

Back to Bond. Janssen said joining the franchise also delivered a steep learning curve. “You learn very quickly from day one that there is a publicity machine behind a Bond movie that is like no other franchise, not even like the X-Men,” said the actress, who went on to play Jean Grey in that blockbuster franchise. “Over all these years, they know how to promote something. On our first week of filming — I hadn’t even been on set yet — they had a press conference for 800 [journalists] like a junket with round tables. It was with the British press and they’re notorious. I love you all but they are notoriously difficult. Right away, I was, like, ‘Oh my God, this is it. This is what we’re going to be dealing with.’ [I was playing] such a specific character who was a foreigner and I was being catapulted into this big machine. There was a whole stigma about it.”

Janssen said it was tough navigating “stigma to stigma” as a model-turned-actress-turned-Bond girl.

“I was, like, on my God, what am I doing to myself and my career? I kept having to climb out of every box I was being put in. After [GoldenEye] came out, it really put me in the spotlight in a way that I had never experienced, and it gave me visibility and choices,” she said, though she was very choosy. “I turned down everything that had a gun, that had a ‘this,’ that had a ‘that.’ I waited until this one project came along called City of Industry with Harvey Keitel, and that was the one I liked because it was down and out.”