Nowadays, if you haven't seen a new Marvel Studios movie you will be told by someone you’re living under a rock. Films and TV shows based on Marvel comic books are often among the most prevalent pop culture moments and each movie breaks box office record after record, most recently with Spider-Man: No Way Home. It’s tough to remember a time when superhero movies were huge, but when the X-Men trilogy was hitting theaters there was nothing else like it being made.
With the comic book movie boom very much still in hyper speed, the X-Men’s original Jean Grey, Famke Janssen shared her perspective on the genre having been part of the dawn of the era. In her words to CinemaBlend:
You know what’s so interesting about the X-Men franchise is they really changed the nature of those types of movies because before that they had been incredibly glossy and the costumes – everything was over the top. And when we started making them, the whole idea was that we were grounding these people in reality. They were just everyday people like you and me, but they happened to have superpowers. That was very much what we were trying to do with those films and from that moment on, those types of superhero movies have changed as a result of that. So it was interesting to be part of that journey and see how things changed.
Famke Janssen offers some great points about why the X-Men movies were so influential to where we are today with Marvel movies. They were perhaps the first movies of their kind to be rooted in reality and the world as we know it rather than be a live-action cartoon of comic book pages. Janssen continued:
The other thing that was very much part of the X-Men franchise was a fair amount, maybe half as many women as there were male superheroes had never been seen prior to that. Maybe you had the one gratuitous female superhero in the movie here or there, but they set the tone for a whole new world of superheroes and I think that’s really cool and interesting.
It’s true. The X-Men movies were groundbreaking at the time for including a nearly even amount of men and women characters in the main cast. I mean we’re talking about Halle Berry’s Storm, Anna Paquin’s Rogue and Rebecca Romijn’s Mystique alongside Janssen. The early 00s was a time for experimentation for the superhero genre and the X-Men movies not only hold up today, they continued to forward her story in the franchise until just a few years ago.
Famke Janssen’s last appearance in the franchise was in 2014’s Days of the Future Past, but with her most recent project, Redeeming Love, some of her X-Men past caught up with her when one of her The Last Stand co-stars became her co-star again. Eric Dane, who played Multiple Man in the 2006 film recalled with CinemaBlend being on the set of the film early on in his career:
Famke gave me a ride to set once because she had a super fancy car they were driving her around in Vancouver. This was the third X-Men, so she was just about to become Dark Phoenix. And she was part of this massive action franchise that I had this very small role in. There were a hundred of me but it was very tight and I just remember going ‘Wow, she’s taking me for a ride in her car to set, I’ve made a good impression.’ Oh my, we were out in the woods that day. Just out in the middle of the woods. Wild. With hundreds of extras. Ah, the good ‘ole days.
Dane fondly remembers being on the set of the massive Marvel project. He recalls the early impression the Jean Grey actress had on him as they shot some major sequences for The Last Stand. The pair star together in Redeeming Love, a romance film based on the book by Francine Rivers. Check out CinemaBlend’s review of the film and see Redeeming Love in theaters now.
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Sarah El-Mahmoud
Staff Writer
Sarah El-Mahmoud has been with CinemaBlend since 2018 after graduating from Cal State Fullerton with a degree in Journalism. In college, she was the Managing Editor of the award-winning college paper, The Daily Titan, where she specialized in writing/editing long-form features, profiles and arts & entertainment coverage, including her first run-in with movie reporting, with a phone interview with Guillermo del Toro for Best Picture winner, The Shape of Water. Now she's into covering YA television and movies, and plenty of horror. Word webslinger. All her writing should be read in Sarah Connor’s Terminator 2 voice over.
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