Daily Inspiration Quote by Famke Janssen

Famke Janssen’s line lands like a backstage aside that accidentally tells the truth about the whole casting call. It’s punchy because it takes the endless “Are audiences ready?” hand-wringing around female superheroes and flips it into a cruder, more honest market read: readiness was never the issue; permission was. The joke is doing double duty, both puncturing studio timidity and exposing the industry’s default setting for female power on-screen: it must be either aspirational for women or consumable for men, ideally both at once.

The subtext is less “female heroes are inevitable” than “Hollywood only greenlights them when it can sell desire alongside empowerment.” Janssen sketches a two-lane highway of audience identification - women projecting into the character, men projecting onto her body - and the blunt phrasing (“do them”) refuses the polite language that usually disguises that equation. It’s a one-sentence summary of the male gaze as a business model.

Context matters: Janssen came up in an era when “strong female character” often meant leather, a tragic backstory, and a camera that lingered one beat too long. Her career arcs through X-Men, Bond, and prestige TV - worlds where women can be lethal and still framed as decoration. The intent isn’t to scold the audience so much as to tease the gatekeepers: stop pretending risk is the barrier. You’ve always known how to sell women with powers. The question is whether you’re willing to let them be fully human when they use them.