Gillian Anderson, Variety Icon Awardee, on Playing Radical Women and What She’s ‘Rebelled Against’ in Hollywood
Few people can say their comfort zone is in playing strong women, but for Gillian Anderson, it ’s become something of a personal brand.
The American-British actor, who was once best-known for her skeptical FBI agent Dana Scully in Fox’s long-running sci-fi hit “The X-Files,” has gone on to play detective Stella Gibson in “The Fall,” notorious British prime minister Margaret Thatcher in “The Crown” and sex therapist Jean Milburn in “Sex Education.” (And you wouldn’t want to cross any of them.)
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Anderson — who will receive the Variety Icon Award in a ceremony at CannesSeries on April 1 — will next be seen portraying the rarely dramatized Eleanor Roosevelt, opposite Viola Davis’ Michelle Obama and Michelle Pfeiffer’s Betty Ford, in Showtime’s drama “The First Lady.”
But portraying no-nonsense women didn’t begin as a conscious choice for Anderson. In 1993, she recognized a “stark difference” between the Dana Scully role and “pretty much everything else on television at the time,” though, at age 24, she wouldn’t have labelled Scully as the feminist icon she’d come to represent.
“I don’t think it was as clear-cut in my mind as being, ‘Oh, this is a feminist character,’” she says. “I think that it was more of just, ‘This is a woman that I haven’t seen before on television, and she’s so unique.’”
Yet Anderson describes a “knee-jerk reaction” to the sexist behaviors that were prevalent within the world of the show. “I was expected to walk behind [co-star David Duchovny] when [our characters] walked up to the front doors of the people we were investigating,” she says. “There were things that I rebelled against.”
Courtesy of Daniel McFadden/Showtime
After “ The X-Files” wrapped Season 9 in 2002, Anderson returned for a 2008 movie and two more seasons in 2016 and 2018, but closed the door for good soon after. Four years on, with the Chris Carter-helmed show finding new generations of fans on Hulu and Star internationally — not to mention the drive among studios to reboot tried and tested properties for the Wild West of streaming — could she be lured back again?
“It just feels like such an old idea,” says Anderson. “I’ve done it, I did it for so many years, and it also ended on such an unfortunate note.”
The actor is referencing (spoiler alert) Scully’s bizarre pregnancy reveal in the Season 11 finale — a move by the show’s writers that was anathema to X-philes who felt their cool-girl detective deserved a more empowering send-off.
“In order to even begin to have that conversation [about another season] there would need to be a whole new set of writers and the baton would need to be handed on for it to feel like it was new and progressive. So yeah, it’s very much in the past.”
Anderson had no interest in doing another TV series in 2012 when she was offered “The Fall,” an unsettling BBC crime drama in which she’d play another law enforcement official, this time hunting down Jamie Dornan’s depraved serial killer Paul Spector.
“There was something so completely different about [Stella] than Scully, and she felt like such a modern woman to me,” says Anderson. Despite initial reservations, she accepted the role “because of how good and spare and mature the writing was by Allan Cubitt. That really drew me and I felt once again that I hadn’t really seen a character like her before.”
Since first teasing a potential return of “ The Fall” during a Variety “Actors on Actors” conversation in 2021, Anderson says development on another season of the show is indeed underway. As Spector committed suicide in the Season 3 finale, the storyline will continue with Stella likely tackling a new case.
“Dare I say it’s something in the works,” Anderson says coyly. “I don’t know how many episodes we would do, but it’s certainly something that’s bubbling.”
As to whether the BBC and Netflix, which helped to finance and popularize the show among global audiences, will again be partners on the new season, Anderson hesitates. “Not necessarily,” she says smiling.
Courtesy of Des Willie/Netflix
Anderson, who is highly complimentary of Netflix, appeared in another of the streamer’s shows: Season 4 of “The Crown.” She memorably plays an uncompromising Thatcher sparring with Olivia Colman’s Queen Elizabeth II, and earned an supporting actress Emmy last year.
She takes on yet another historical figure in Showtime’s “The First Lady,” though this time, it’s someone whom few have living memories of. Eleanor Roosevelt was married to President Franklin D. Roosevelt, who was paralyzed from the waist down at age 39 and eventually used a wheelchair. As he served four terms in office, Eleanor Roosevelt served as first lady from 1933 through to 1945.
“She was unbelievably prolific in her good works, whether those good works were her civil rights works or for the underprivileged or soldiers, or the articles or the books that she wrote, or the radio shows that she did — whatever she set her mind to,” says Anderson.
But much like Thatcher, for whom Anderson assumed a quivering deep and throaty tone, the role was a physical one that required a great deal of voice work. “She had a very, very specific voice — a very specific accent and pitch,” says Anderson, who naturally has a deeper voice.
“She had a very, very high voice and I had to make some decisions early on to not turn away too many audience members with too high of an interpretation of what she was doing and find some kind of a middle ground with it.”
The team also worked hard, says Anderson, to edge her shorter frame toward Roosevelt’s tall physicality, “without it feeling too comical.”
It’s difficult to imagine Anderson being anything but composed. She’s almost unnervingly collected, thoughtful and articulate. Certainly, it’s not a massive leap between her calm demeanor and the unruffled characters she tends to play on screen.
When she has been cast in comedies, she’s always ended up playing “the straight man,” Anderson admits, “rather than the one who actually gets to crack a joke.” Her personal humor veers more into the “Curb Your Enthusiasm” camp, she explains.
That’s why taking on the audacious Jean Milburn on Netflix’s “Sex Education,” which is soon heading into Season 4, has been so liberating. “I think for a lot of people, it does feel like it’s a new idea: Me being cast as a comedian,” says Anderson.
“The minute I picked up the scripts and started reading, I couldn’t put them down,” she says. “I’m incredibly grateful to be a part of that show. I feel like I only really got the importance of it culturally in this moment in time, after it started to air.”
In Britain, “Sex Education” received its share of criticism for its American stylings in a U.K. setting, but Anderson points out that “the diehard audiences eat all of that up.”
“And that’s precisely why they seem to get it more: Because it’s no time, no place. It’s its own special world of …” after a long pause, she giggles and needs cajoling to finish her sentence.
“Fluidity,” she declares finally. “In all of its meanings.”
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