Nicolette van Dam, the Zoop actress who took her marriage to Netflix’s Love Is Blind

Nicolette van Dam

Photo: Sander_Jan_Klerk_en_Nicolette_van_Dam.jpg: Sander 198 derivative work: Huhbakker (talk) / CC BY-SA 3.0, via Wikimedia Commons

Born	August 14, 1984 Amsterdam
Occupation	Television Presenter

Every edition of Love Is Blind is fronted by a married couple, and the Dutch one needed a pair viewers could already picture at their own kitchen table. Netflix picked Nicolette van Dam and Bas Smit, an actress-presenter and an Instagram entrepreneur who have spent years running their marriage as a shared public enterprise of books and business ventures. On paper the choice was obvious. In practice it reopened the oldest question about her: on the panel of Vandaag Inside, Johan Derksen said the presenting duo made him want to throw up, and readers under the NU.nl report on the show called the couple fake. For someone whose whole career has been built on being easy to like, being disliked as a pair is a new kind of review.

There is an irony she has already turned into box office. Her most successful film character of recent years is Juf Brakel, the head teacher in Carry Slee’s children’s books who bans birthday treats and school trips until her pupils rename her Juf Braaksel, which in Dutch means something close to Miss Vomit. Families have kept buying tickets to watch her be the villain.

Nicolette Helena Elizabeth van Dam was born in Amsterdam on 14 August 1984 and finished her havo diploma at the Keizer Karel College in Amstelveen. She began a higher-education course in communication and marketing, left it unfinished, and signed up for presenting workshops and acting classes instead. Modelling work led to cameos in music videos for Dutch pop acts, and from there to a casting call that would define her for a generation of children.

In 2004 she became Bionda Kroonenberg, the vain blonde among the teenage rangers of Zoop, a Nickelodeon soap filmed inside Ouwehands Dierenpark. The series spun off three cinema films. Zoop in Africa and Zoop in India were sold to 44 countries between them, the second passed 100,000 admissions in the Netherlands to earn a Golden Film, and Van Dam sang its title song, “Jadoo Jadoo”. A third film, set in South America, closed the run in 2007.

The adult career arrived in pieces. She played a spa attendant in Deuce Bigalow: European Gigolo, Rob Schneider’s sequel set in Amsterdam, and took guest parts in the police series Baantjer and Van Speijk. Then came Voetbalvrouwen, the footballers’-wives drama in which she played Solange de Reuver from 2007 to 2009. Its first season averaged just over 900,000 viewers on the short-lived channel Tien, and the second moved to RTL 4 when Tien folded.

Presenting took over almost by stealth. After Pimp My Room on MTV with Leon van der Zanden and the Sunday-morning block Jetix Max with Jamai Loman, RTL 4 hired her in 2008 and kept her busy for seven years: De Bloemenstal with Winston Gerschtanowitz, Ik wed dat ik het kan! with Carlo Boszhard, the talent show My Name Is Michael with Koen Wauters, the family-health series Help, ons kind is te dik and the home-and-interiors programme RTL Woonmagazine. When that last show ended in the autumn of 2015, so did her work at RTL 4. She moved to SBS6 to host The Next Boy/Girl Band with Tim Douwsma in 2016, signed a two-year SBS contract in 2017 that began with Kitchen Impossible on Net5, and went freelance in 2019. On the Dutch The Masked Singer she hid inside the Panther costume and reached the final, finishing fourth.

The episode that still follows her name has nothing to do with television. In June 2014, during the World Cup, she posted a doctored image of the Colombian players James Rodríguez and Radamel Falcao appearing to snort cocaine, captioned “Colombian wall”. She deleted it and apologised in Spanish and English. It was not enough. Colombia’s foreign minister, María Ángela Holguín, said it was not the first disparaging tweet from Van Dam and that Colombia would not accept it, and the government pressed UNICEF to drop her. Within days she gave up her role as a UNICEF goodwill ambassador, and the organisation said her position had become untenable. The incident exposed the risk built into her appeal. The chatty, unfiltered online voice that makes her an easy host can, in one post, turn into a diplomatic complaint. The criticism of the Netflix casting is a gentler cousin of the same charge, that the Van Dam-Smit household is a commercial machine wearing a permanent smile. Wilfred Genee, sitting next to Derksen, insisted the two are fine once you get to know them.

Away from presenting, the acting never fully stopped. She played a nurse in the black comedy Kankerlijers, had a supporting part in Perfectly Imperfect, Appie Boudellah’s 2025 drama starring her old Voetbalvrouwen co-star Yolanthe Cabau, and then took the title role in Juf Braaksel en de magische ring in 2023, directed by Aram van de Rest with Djamila and the rapper Kraantje Pappie. Juf Braaksel en de geniale ontsnapping followed in 2024 and Juf Braaksel en de mysterieuze verdwijning in December 2025, and each of the three crossed the 100,000-ticket line for a Golden Film. Few Dutch actresses of her generation have a family franchise that reliable.

Love Is Blind: Netherlands premiered on Netflix on 30 September 2026 with thirty singles dating through a wall in the familiar pods. Five episodes dropped on launch day, three more on 7 October and the finale on 14 October, with a reunion episode on 18 October. Smit has said presenting was never his ambition, but that the format is the whole family’s favourite programme.

Van Dam and Smit have been together since 2007 and married in July 2015; they have two daughters. Around 2013 she and her brother took over Brasserie van Dam, their parents’ restaurant in Amsterdam’s Cornelis Schuytstraat, and the couple have published two books together, Nederland heeft Alles in 2021 and Amsterdam heeft Alles a year later.

Netflix has not announced a second Dutch season, so the verdict on the couple as hosts is still open. The Juf Braaksel films have already settled the other question: Nicolette van Dam does not need an audience to like her on screen to fill a cinema.

Tags: actors, actresses, Yolanthe Cabau, Bas Smit, Love is Blind: Netherlands, Nicolette van Dam

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