Famke Janssen on Jean Grey and Strong Female X-MEN Characters
I'm going to jump right into SPOILERS so if you haven't watched X-Men: Days of Future Past yet don't read beyond this point.
One of the happiest moments for me in X-Men: Days of Future Past, other than Quicksilver's prison break scene, was when we saw the return of James Marsden as Scott Summers and Famke Janssen as Jean Grey. They weren't in it that long, but it was so cool to see those characters resurrected from the dead. I really hope they come back for more X-Men movie greatness.
In a recent interview with Comingsoon, Janssen briefly discussed her character being brought back, and how it all came about. It's not surprising that she was sworn to secrecy not to say anything before the movie came out. I'm really glad that bit of information didn't leak out. She had this to say about coming back:
"They were deep into filming when they approached me. I had run into James Marsden at various film festivals with films, and we've bumped into one another, but I don't get to see Patrick (Stewart) or any of them as often or frequently as I want to, so whenever we're on set together, it's sort of like a family reunion."
She goes on to talk about the strong female characters in these film saying:
"That's generally what I find wonderful about these X-Men characters, that there are as many female characters are there male [sic], which doesn't seem to be the case most of the time, I find. A lot of these comic book adaptations aren't necessarily like that a lot of the time—the women's parts are essentially the girlfriends or whatever—so it's really nice to play the scientist, doctor or a strong interesting character. And then we have to really focus on the love story part of it on Wolverine and Jean Grey, and it keeps giving something, especially because it supposedly can't go anywhere, so it becomes even more fun to play around with it. That's thanks to Bryan Singer. He set it up as a universe full of interesting strong women."
I've always enjoyed the female characters in X-Men, and Singer and Matthew Vaughn have both done a great job bringing them to life on the big screen. I'm really excited to see what Singer does with X-Men: Apocalypse and what new and old characters he plans on bringing into the story.