In a tete-a-tete with Team Viva, Famke Janssen says, ‘It is important for women to go behind the camera to initiate change for the fairer sex in showbiz’
It’s been quite the journey for Dutch-born actress, Famke Janssen. During her exciting and varied career, Janssen has brought some incredibly strong, complex characters to life. She has continued to do so with her starring role in the action-packed Blacklist spinoff, The Blacklist Redemption.
Famek Janssen’s character, Susan “Scottie” Hargrave was introduced during the third season of The Blacklist. The show was also utilised to air a backdoor pilot for the upcoming spinoff which revealed some rather juicy and intimate details about the original series’ characters. The episode revealed that Tom was actually the son of Susan Hargrave, whom most believed to have been murdered over 30 years ago.
Speaking about her character in the spinoff and how the viewers should expect her character to develop over the course of the show’s first season, she said, “Scottie is a woman with a lot of layers, and as the season progresses we’ll unravel some of those. Her son went missing, and that is the biggest mystery in her life and also what defines her ultimately.”
The new show is set to explore Tom’s journey into figuring out what exactly happened to him and why someone lied when confessing to his murder. This will require getting close with his mother, without alluding to the relationship Reddington (James Spader) warned he must keep secret.
Janssen’s TV career is almost as distinct as her career in film. She had her first major television breakthrough as manipulative transgender life coach, Ava Moore, from there she landed a starring role in one of Netflix’s first original series, and then she landed a guest spot as a powerful attorney in another TV series. Janssen said that the journey this far has been really good. “The big thing that put me on the map was the Bond movie, and it catapulted me in a very specific direction. I worked very hard against that for years on independent films with Woody Allen and Robert Altman, only to come back to the X-Men series to play Jean Grey. So my career has been defined by these very big, strong, powerful women. I thought, well, if I just am going to go against type, it will pay off over time. Whether it really has or not, I don’t know,” she added.
So what was it about Redemption that drew JanssenIJ She answered, “One of the deciding factors was New York City. The fact that I get to stay at home and sleep in my own bed is such a luxury after working all over the world. And the character of Scottie is unpredictable in a way that I like. She can take a detour and start talking about her insecurities and anxieties in the middle of an interrogation.”
Janssen has been an outspoken advocate for women’s rights in film for many years now. She said that it is important for women to go behind the camera to initiate change for the fairer sex in showbiz. “I mean the biggest changes as we as women will make is when we have more women behind the cameras as writers, directors, producers. So that’s something we’ll continue to fight for,” she said.
She added that staring in The Blacklist: Redemption is “like a bit of a personal victory” in that sense. “I think every time we see a strong female character, wherever that may be, on television and in theatre, it’s really a wonderful moment that we should celebrate and I’m extremely honoured and grateful for this opportunity to play such a strong and complex character on the show,” concluded the actress.
The Blacklist: Redemption airs every Friday on Colors Infinity.