Gaite Jansen, the Peaky Blinders Actress Who Wants to Write and Direct Her Own Film

Gaite Jansen

Photo: Vera de Kok / CC BY-SA 4.0, via Wikimedia Commons

Born	December 25, 1991 Rotterdam, Netherlands
Occupation	Actress and writer
Known for	Babygirl, Sonny Boy, Happy Ending

Outside the Netherlands, Gaite Jansen tends to turn up at the edge of someone else’s story. She was the Russian grand duchess entangled with Cillian Murphy‘s Tommy Shelby in Peaky Blinders, the sweet-natured sex worker in Carla Gugino’s orbit in Jett, a handful of scenes opposite Nicole Kidman in Babygirl. At home she carries films, and this year one of them, PAAZ, filled cinemas and then sat for weeks in the Netflix top ten. She has also been writing, and her first novel began as a screenplay she wanted to direct. The question her career is asking now is whether the actress who has spent two decades inside other people’s scripts is about to start writing her own.

Her first name is a boy’s name, Gait, from her father’s native Overijssel, with an -e added when she turned out to be a girl. Gaite Sara Kim Jansen grew up in Rotterdam, where she was born on Christmas Day, and she was on a stage early: at six she joined the Jeugdtheaterschool Hofplein, because she had seen actors on Sesamstraat and wanted to do what they did. Her parents did not want a child actor in the house. She disagreed, and kept working through secondary school at a Steiner school in Zeist.

The training was not gentle. As a young actor she was met with harsh, tearing-down criticism, and she has since said she considers it the wrong way to teach anyone. She went on to the Toneelacademie Maastricht anyway, training there from 2010 to 2014, by which point she already had a screen career most drama students would envy.

That career had started in earnest in 2009, when she was 17, with Lover of Loser, an adaptation of a Carry Slee youth novel that she has called her breakthrough, and with a part in Frans Weisz’s Happy End the same year. In the television drama In therapie she played Sophie, a young gymnast with suicidal thoughts, and was nominated for the Beeld en Geluid Award. Then came 170 Hz, Joost van Ginkel’s 2011 film about two deaf teenagers in love, in which she played Evy and spoke mostly in Dutch Sign Language. It earned her a Golden Calf nomination for best actress. Supernova by Tamar van den Dop gave her another lead and a slot in the Generation section of the Berlinale in 2014.

The same year she joined Toneelgroep Amsterdam, playing Ophelia in Guy Cassiers’s Hamlet vs Hamlet. The offer to play Grand Duchess Tatiana Petrovna in the third series of Peaky Blinders, broadcast in 2016, ended her time in the ensemble, and for about two and a half years she lived partly in New York and enjoyed being anonymous. A role in the fourth series of Line of Duty followed in 2017, and in 2019 Sebastian Gutierrez cast her as Phoenix in Jett, his Cinemax crime series starring Carla Gugino. Gutierrez cast her again, opposite Gugino, in the Peacock thriller Leopard Skin. Back home she was a fixture of Hollands Hoop as Talia Chanti.

Here is where the neat story of a Dutch actress going international gets less flattering. Read the English-language credits in a row and a pattern appears: the exiled aristocrat, the sex worker, the European in an American pulp story, the cameo in a friend’s film. Supporting parts, often defined by foreignness or desire, made her recognisable abroad. The leads, where she builds a character across a whole film, are in Dutch, and many of them travelled very little. She has said herself that 170 Hz, the film that made her name at home, was seen by almost nobody. Even her biggest Dutch success does not come without an argument. De Volkskrant gave PAAZ four stars and said she struck exactly the right tone as a patient. Binge.nl found the characters from Myrthe van der Meer’s autobiographical novel reduced to caricatures and the portrayal of mental health care strange. She is the face of both readings.

The writing runs alongside all of this and has been there as long as the acting. She wrote poems from the age of six. In New York she published Learning How to Speak, wrote columns for Elle and, during the pandemic, directed a short film, Beast. In 2023 the publisher Hollands Diep released Ode aan de onstilbare / Ode to the Insatiable, a bilingual collection in Dutch and English dedicated to her former partner, the filmmaker Mees Peijnenburg. Her debut novel, Het lichaam is onschuldig, followed in October 2025. It follows a Dutch dancer in New York who falls under the spell of a famous choreographer twenty years older. Jansen spent about a year trying to make it work as a screenplay, because, as she told the Dutch news agency ANP, she would love to write and direct a feature, and turned it into a novel when her publisher, Elco Lenstra, suggested it over lunch.

She played a few scenes with Nicole Kidman in Babygirl, directed by her friend Halina Reijn, and Nick Frost and Alicia Silverstone‘s daughter in the comedy Krazy House, both in 2024. Before that came the lead in Joosje Duk’s Netflix film Happy Ending in 2023. In January 2025 she joined Alfie Allen, Charlie Murphy and Jack Gleeson in the Videoland crime series Safe Harbor. That December German audiences met her as Lynn de Baer, a Dutch chief inspector working alongside Wotan Wilke Möhring’s Thorsten Falke in a two-part Tatort about organised crime on the Dutch-German border. The t-online critic called her the emotional centre of the story. The same case reached Dutch viewers as the four-part miniseries Tatort: Over Grenzen, the first Dutch-German co-production in the franchise’s history, on NPO 1 from 2 August 2026.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=L27F3XzD1N0

PAAZ, directed by Anne de Clercq and released in February 2026, is the film that put her name above the title. She plays Emma, a 29-year-old who seems to have everything in order until she is admitted to the psychiatric ward of a general hospital and insists it is all a mistake. By May the film had passed 100,000 admissions and earned a Golden Film, which Jansen collected with De Clercq. In June it arrived on Netflix, and by early July it had spent four straight weeks in the Dutch top ten. In English the film is known as Honestly, I’m Fine.

She lives in the Spaarndammerbuurt in Amsterdam. No new screen role has been announced since Tatort: Over Grenzen. The more interesting open question is one she has put on record herself: a feature film she writes and directs. The novel was the screenplay that did not work yet. The next attempt may not need anyone else’s script at all.

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Tags: actors, actresses, Dutch cinema, Peaky Blinders, Carla Gugino, Gaite Jansen, Halina Reijn

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