Gillian Anderson Is Still the ‘Most Bizarre Girl.’ She’s Perfectly Fine With That

Getty Images; Everett Collection; art by Channing Smith

Gillian Anderson’s latest role involves the UK’s royal family, but if you ask the two-time Emmy winner, the British monarchy is by far the least interesting part of that story. Yes, her new film Scoop (premiering on Netflix Friday, April 5) centers on Prince Andrew’s first sit-down interview about his friendship with a convicted sex offender and financier, the late Jeffrey Epstein (which later resulted in him stepping down from official royal duties), but the more profound story here is how it happened.

That’s where Anderson comes in. She plays BBC Newsnight anchor and journalist Emily Maitlis, who conducted the infamous 2019 interview after months of tenacious work by her producer, Sam McAlister (played by Billie Piper), to secure the booking.

“I remember hearing about the interview, but I hadn’t seen it right away,” Anderson tells me over Zoom from her New York hotel room. “I remember it being a really big deal, particularly in the UK where I live.” And yet Anderson (who was born in Chicago and spent her adolescence between the US and the UK) don’t really pay much attention to it. She watched clips eventually, noting that it was “so cringeworthy” she found it difficult to watch. “So studying it properly for the sake of re-creation…it’s kind of extraordinary,” she says.

Regardless of who was in the interview’s hot seat, Anderson was only focused on one thing: getting it right, and doing right by Maitlis. She remembers sitting across from Rufus Sewell (who plays the disgraced prince) at an early read-through, and saying, “Oh my God, what have we got ourselves into?” Looking back, she says that while she definitely felt prepared, “sometimes regardless of how prepared you are, nerves can be extreme.”

But if anyone’s going to take a role by the horns and give it their all, it’s the 55-year-old mother of three, who’s also a recipient of the prestigious Order of the British Empire (OBE) for her contributions to the arts and sciences. Whether she was playing FBI special agent Dana Scully in The X-Files or Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher in The Crown, Anderson has carefully studied and executed every opportunity she’s been given.

It’s only been recently, though, that she’s started to have more fun with leaning into her public persona and speaking about more than just her outstanding roles. On topics from women’s sexual pleasure to bold fashion choices, she’s done being silent, and we’re better off for it.

For Glamour's latest Icons Only feature, Anderson opens up about the lessons she’s unlearning now, reading Great Expectations to a then Prince Charles, and why she’s more than happy still being referred to as the “most bizarre girl.”

Glamour: How do you feel about doing press in general? And has playing the role of Emily Maitlis in Scoop changed how you approach your own interviews?

Gillian Anderson: I think I’m much more compassionate to the interviewers, especially because this film is a behind-the-scenes look at the acquisition of the interview, and particularly the women who helped secure it and made it happen.

And for me, I think I have gotten better at doing interviews over the years. In my early career, I was really, really nervous, to the point that I’d have to ask interviewers to ask questions over and over again because my brain would just shut down. Also, I’m much more lighthearted about it than I used to be. I think my fear often got in the way of being light. I was very serious back then. So yeah, things have changed.

Has there ever been a headline or something written about you where you couldn’t believe how were you described, whether it was funny or frustrating?

Maybe I contributed to it because I took it so seriously for such a long time that the interviewer’s take—for print, particularly—on me was just so different than the experience that I thought we were having in the room, or that I would’ve thought they would’ve had. There’s certainly been that. I think it was a Daily Mail picture many years ago of me talking about all the plastic surgery that I’d had done, and which I hadn’t had done, and so it was one of the very first tweets that I ever sent out. I don’t normally comment on that stuff, but I felt compelled to comment on that one, just because it was so ludicrous. There’s been so much, and lots of nonsense.

As I was looking through photos for this piece, I found two in particular that struck me, given your connection to roles involving the British royal family. There’s a photo with you and Queen Elizabeth II, as well as one with a then Prince Charles and the Duchess of Cornwall, Camilla. What were those interactions like?

I’ve met the queen a couple of times. When you live in the UK, sometimes you are invited to Buckingham Palace, and the picture that you’re referring to was around the time I did Johnny English Reborn, with Rowan Atkinson. You get 0.5 seconds to say hello. And the one with Prince Charles, I think, was way at the beginning of my moving to the UK. I had done Bleak House, and I was invited for the anniversary of Dickens’s birth. It must have been when I did Great Expectations, because I was asked to read a passage from Great Expectations to Prince Charles and the Duchess of Cornwall. It’s funny because I forgot about all these.

What was that like—reading a passage from Great Expectations to the future king?

They’re human beings, and he’s very charming, and she was very sweet. I think I made a completely inappropriate joke, which is what I usually end up doing.

They probably enjoyed that.

But I felt honored that they’d asked me. It was being in Dickens’s museum and getting to read a piece from an original text, so it was a wonderful experience.

Which member of the royal family awarded you the Order of the British Empire (OBE), by the way?

Well, when you’re not British, it’s not a member of the royal family that present it to you. And I was going to be away for a long time, and wasn’t going to be in town when whoever it was was going to be able to give it to me, so I asked if they could ship it to me. [Laughs.]

I don’t blame you, though. If they’re not going to present it to you, that’s just rude!

No, they’re busy people. They can’t do it for every Tom, Dick, and Harry.

Well, you’re not just every Tom, Dick, and Harry. You’re Gillian Anderson! You're what we consider an icon, hence this piece.

They can’t do it for every icon. For goodness’ sake. [Laughs.]

Speaking of, let’s talk about some of your most memorable, iconic roles. When fans meet you, what role do they reference most?

It’s interesting, because most of the time it’s either The Fall, Sex Education, The X-Files, or The Crown. So probably those four.

When I was going through your Instagram, you often use the hashtag #YoniOfTheDay, and yoni is Sanskrit for the word “womb.” You also cowrote a book in 2017 called We: A Manifesto for Women Everywhere, but did working on Sex Education empower you to talk more openly about sexuality and women’s reproductive organs?

When I got the role of Jean Milburn in Sex Education, I was taking pictures on set of all of the penises and vaginas that Jean has in her house. And when I first wanted to start sending them out, the girl that does my Instagram kept saying, “You can’t, you’ll get shut down. You can’t send pictures of.…” But then things got a bit laxer. I don’t know what point it switched over, but we started to do regular #PenisOfTheDay and #YoniOfTheDay. It could have been #VaginaOfTheDay instead, but…because, for the penis of the day, there’s the eggplant, the aubergine, and for the yoni, we usually put this flower. So the word yoni and the flower made sense. It felt like there was something more uplifting than saying “vagina of the day.” So we landed on yoni. That’s where that came from.

And then it just started this routine of posting those kinds of things. People started sending me pictures of yoni, or often penises or yonis in nature. There was this fantastic one that was a poodle looking out of a window, but the outline of the poodle looked like a penis, and the ball sacks on the side. And then yonis, and icebergs, and all that kind of stuff. So it just started this trend and there were some highlights in there.

This is fascinating.

Then I launched a functional drink that I decided to call G-Spot, which further moved me into the world of all things around women’s sexual health, sexual wellness, etc., and started to properly talk about that in a meaningful way. The charity that we decided that we were going to collaborate with, for the sake of the G-Spot drinks, was called Wellness of Women, with its cross-generational research into women’s health and women’s sexual health. And so it started this ongoing conversation.

And now you have a new book called Want, which comes out this September, and is about what women want, and their most intimate fears and fantasies. Tell us about that.

I was approached to do a modern-day take on Nancy Friday’s My Secret Garden, which was a collection of anonymous letters from women around the world about their sexual fantasies. It felt like the right fit. I was curious to see what the differences are between today and the early ’70s in terms of what’s going on in women’s heads when they think about sex and sexual fantasy, and the degree to which they are still—as a lot of the early letters showed—still wrapped up in a lot of shame and guilt and fear. Anyway, so yes, that’s my world.

Would you ever host a podcast the way Jean did on the last season of Sex Education?

Possibly. Very possibly. Since I’ve launched the drink, there are other avenues that I’m going down as well, more in an unconventional wellness route than necessarily traditional wellness, which has, over the last few years, become somewhat toxic. So yeah, I could see having conversations in that type of format around all things having to do with women.

You said a couple of years ago that you were going to give up wearing bras for good. How’s that going?

Yeah, it’s going good. I generally wear bras when I’m doing press because…well, there was a situation earlier today that required more than just a bra. You don’t need to know all those details. But yeah, most of the time I do not. Actually, 99.9% of the time I am braless.

As you live more life, what lessons are you unlearning now, that you perhaps were taught when you were younger?

I love that term, unlearning, and I think that I have gone through a great deal of my life hiding, in a way, veering more toward saying no to things and not wanting to put my head above the parapet, or to really comment on things. I have a tendency to be very private and to not really raise my voice.

And I think that in starting G-Spot and the other businesses around it has made me…realize that there are fans out there who have been impacted in a positive way by either the characters that I’ve played, or by the charity work that I’ve done, or by things that I have said over time, and that it’s okay for me to talk about them in a public forum. And maybe, in so doing, women will be inspired or feel more courageous in their own lives to ask for what they want, either from life or from their partner, or be of service, or take risks, no matter how scary they are.

So part of that is unlearning, not shyness, but unlearning the desire to stay hidden and not talk about things publicly.

I love that. And as we’re being told to wrap, let me ask you this: I read that you were voted by your high school classmates as class clown, most bizarre girl, and most likely to be arrested. And that you were actually arrested on graduation night for breaking and entering into your high school in an attempt to glue the locks of the doors. Is that true?

Yeah, that’s true. That says it all right there. It really does. You have no idea.

I think back in the day, one would never want to hear themselves being described as “most bizarre girl,” but now there’s something quite powerful in that.

I own that, “the most bizarre girl.” I love that. You’re right. I must make a T-shirt or something.

So how would you say you’re “most bizarre?”

Oh, just ask my kids. They will give you a long list. Particularly my daughter. She’s been compiling all the bizarre things about her mother over the years. When I die, there’s going to be a tomb this thick of all the bizarre things that she has witnessed take place in her childhood.

This interview has been edited for length and clarity.

Jessica Radloff is the Glamour senior West Coast editor and author of the NYT best-selling book The Big Bang Theory: The Definitive, Inside Story of the Epic Hit Series.

Originally Appeared on Glamour