She became famous playing buttoned-up Agent Scully. But in midlife her characters often have a strong erotic charge.
By Rebecca Mead
July 29, 2024
?Have you turned me on?? Gillian Anderson asked, as she walked swiftly from her trailer on the back lot of a studio in Calgary, swishing up the hem of the long woollen skirt she was wearing to check whether a microphone transmitter affixed to a leather boot was functioning. It was mid-June, and Anderson had been based in Alberta since May, filming ?The Abandons,? a lavish new Netflix drama set in Oregon in the mid-eighteen-hundreds. Her boots were scuffed and grimy; the previous day, she?d been shooting scenes on horseback, on location in the foothills of the Canadian Rockies, in her role as Constance Van Ness, a flinty matriarch who has inherited, and substantially increased, the mining fortune made by her late husband. ?It?s dust, dust, dust for days, and then mud, mud, mud for days,? she told me, with relish.
Anderson?s career was forged in Canada. When she was in her mid-twenties, she was cast as the F.B.I. agent Dana Scully in ?The X-Files,? the sci-fi drama that d?buted on Fox in 1993. ?I got the job on a Thursday, and I was needed in Vancouver on the Saturday,? Anderson said. The first five seasons were shot in British Columbia, and the show?s dark, gloomy aesthetic was partly a product of the region?s meteorological conditions. ?The X-Files,? which ran for nearly a decade, turned Anderson from a couch-surfing unknown into a globally recognized star, and introduced a novel kind of character to network television. Scully, brainy and acerbic, more than held her own with her fellow-agent Fox Mulder, played by David Duchovny, and, in contrast with the proliferating starlet roles featured in rival nineties shows such as ?Beverly Hills 90210? and ?Baywatch,? Anderson?s character was notably frumpy and invariably serious. (There are Reddit threads devoted to discussing whether, during the entire run of ?The X-Files,? Scully ever really smiled or laughed.) Anderson told me that, while filming a scene in an early episode, she sought to add some shading to her character by letting a tear roll down her cheek; she got a call from the show?s creator, Chris Carter, telling her that the ultra-rational Scully wouldn?t have broken down at that moment??that she was basically a badass.?
Otto Bathurst, the director of the first episode of ?The Abandons,? told me that Anderson?s ability to make the repetitive pleasurable to watch?essential to the success of a long-running show?was one reason she had been cast in what Netflix clearly hopes will be a tentpole series. ?It?s a real challenge to find actors who have the kind of intrigue and depth that makes you want to keep hanging out with them,? Bathurst said. ?That?s what she?s terrific at?there?s something else going on behind the eyes.? The show pits Anderson against an Irish immigrant played by Lena Headey, best known as Cersei Lannister in ?Game of Thrones.? Bathurst explained that Constance, ?in lesser hands, could be reduced to a trope?there?s an element of Cruella de Vil at first glance. But it?s a far more interesting and intricate character.? For Anderson, the role was a chance to do something new. ?I?d never done a Western,? she said. She also noted, ?I haven?t really played any baddies before, and Constance Van Ness has as complex an operating system as anyone I?ve ever inhabited.?
The show is partly shot in a purpose-built town of wooden storefronts in a valley about an hour outside Calgary. One day, on the sweltering upstairs floor of the building that represents the Van Ness mining office, Anderson repeated the same few lines for hours?first from a distance, then in closeup. During breaks, she ducked into a small room, hidden behind a frosted-glass window, that was filled with incongruent accoutrements of the twenty-first century: a sleek swivel chair for Anderson to sit in when her hair and makeup were touched up; a place for her to plug in her phone. While recharging, she proudly showed me several videos of her two sons, fifteen and seventeen, both of whom were in Europe competing in downhill mountain-bike races. (She shares custody of them with their father, Mark Griffiths, a British businessman, with whom she was in a relationship in the early two-thousands. Anderson, who is fifty-five, also has a daughter, twenty-nine, from an earlier marriage.) The boys were tackling alarmingly vertiginous courses, but Anderson didn?t seem worried. ?Their dad is very involved in that part of their world, so I get to do my bit, and trust that everything is well taken care of,? she said. When I asked what her bit was, Anderson let out a peal of laughter and said, ?Paying the bills.?
Anderson has often been cast because she?s gifted at capturing a character?s interiority and intelligence. Bryan Fuller, the creator of the NBC series ?Hannibal,? in which Anderson portrayed a serial killer?s therapist, told me, ?When Gillian is playing the smartest person in the room, you buy it immediately.? Moreover, he added, ?she has one of those faces that can change its structure and intent.? This talent for metamorphosis has become a hallmark of Anderson?s work. In Season 4 of ?The Crown,? she became an uncanny simulacrum of Margaret Thatcher, with a tilt of the head, a firming of the chin, and a drop in vocal timbre. ?It was freaky,? Olivia Colman, who played Queen Elizabeth in her middle years, told me. ?She was a little too good.? When Anderson starred in ?The Fall,? playing Stella Gibson?a detective seeking to capture a serial killer played by Jamie Dornan?many dramatic confrontations were carried out through minute facial movements. Dornan told me, ?She has that power where she can move her eyebrow, like, a millimetre and tell a huge chunk of story.?
Anderson has become so firmly identified with portraying formidable women?in Netflix?s recent film ?Scoop,? she played Emily Maitlis, the fiercely tough journalist whose interview with Prince Andrew upended his royal career?that her capacity for freewheeling goofiness strikes a contrast with her artistic seriousness. In the course of several conversations in Calgary, and at her home in London, Anderson was funny, frank, and sometimes profane. She was thoughtful without always already having thought things through, and as unguarded as a person can be while remaining conscious of how her every word might be spun in a Daily Mail headline. When I mentioned to her an anecdote that she?d blithely told James Corden a few years ago, about the time one of her then prepubescent sons unwittingly got an erection, she was horrified to learn that she?d described her son as being naked. ?He was wearing little orange briefs!? she exclaimed. ?Oh, shit, I wonder if I left that detail out???as if including it would have rendered the story substantially less intimate. Anderson is quick to claim that, in real life, she is far less cerebral than many women she has played. ?I haven?t read the books, I didn?t pay attention in school,? she said. ?If you ask me most things about history, or geography, or whatever, I wouldn?t have a clue. My look, stage left, is intellectual. But I literally could be thinking about the washing.?
Anderson?s modesty is excessive: she is culturally avid and intellectually curious. (She mentioned at one point that she has been enjoying the audiobook of Miranda July?s novel ?All Fours.?) Her self-deprecation is itself a form of intelligence: she is a rigorous assessor of her own capacities. Sitting in her trailer in Calgary, she explained that she?d come by her scuffed boots honestly. ?The X-Files? moved its production to Southern California after Season 5, and Anderson relocated to Malibu. ?I didn?t have much time outside of filming, so when I say I studied Pilates I mean I did it four times a year,? she told me. ?But one time the woman who did Pilates with me had just come from horseback riding, and she said it had been amazing, and she told me there was a horse for sale. And, for some weird reason, I thought in my head, If the name of this horse has any relation to me whatsoever, I am going to buy it.? Anderson interrupted herself with a laugh: ?I promise this is not an indication of how I deal with everything.? The horse?s name turned out to be one that Anderson frequently uses as an alias when checking into hotels, so she went ahead and bought it. ?You might think, What a rash and potentially stupid thing to do! But it was extraordinary,? she said. ?The fact that I made time for it, and spent the two hours a day doing it, had a profoundly positive influence on me?it was a level of focus, discipline, and presence that didn?t really exist in my life, and probably hasn?t since.? She continued, ?And, at the end of it, when someone says, ?You have been cast in this film where you ride a horse,? I can say, ?Well, actually, I know how to ride a horse.? Which is very bizarre, because I don?t know how to do anything else. I know how to act, and how to ride a horse.?
While in Calgary, Anderson has been staying in a high-rise luxury tower, in the kind of apartment that a latter-day Alberta mining heiress might keep as a pied-?-terre. The elevator opens into a large living room decorated in shades of greige, with floor-to-ceiling windows. ?I love a floor plan,? Anderson told me when I visited her there one evening, explaining that she moves every five years or so, entirely for the creative pleasure of undergoing a renovation. ?I find deep happiness in trying to make a space work for my needs.? She went on, ?The irony is that I?m often not at home, so I spend a lot of time and effort creating homes that I don?t spend much time in.? Anderson was curled up on a velvet couch, wearing black sweatpants and a black sweater and drinking from a tall glass filled with her own concoction: alcohol-free beer mixed with stevia-sweetened lemonade. (She poured me some, too, but after one sip I left it untouched; she later told me that, after I was gone, she downed my glass as well.) She pointed toward a window with a view of several other high-rises, a few blocks away. ?If I were in London, I?d be more nervous about the fact that those blinds are open?that somebody could be in that building over there with binoculars,? she said, quietly acknowledging the extraordinary contours of her existence.
Anderson was born in Chicago, but from toddlerhood into elementary school she lived in London, where her father was attending film school. In the seventies, the British capital was a more economically depressed, and grimier, place than it is now. ?We used to take a lot of buses, and my mum would constantly say, ?Don?t touch the seats!? ? she recalled. At school, she learned to speak with an English accent??her first language,? she calls it. Anderson was an only child, and told me that she ?played a lot in the garden by myself,? in part because she was bullied by classmates for being a ?Yank.? It can serve an actor well to be ?an impostor everywhere,? as her co-star in ?Scoop,? Rufus Sewell?who is British but lives in Los Angeles?remarked to me recently. Today, Anderson?s accent shifts between lightly accented American and proper British, mostly without her being aware. The only time she really becomes conscious of the phenomenon, she told me, is when she?s at a dinner seated between an American and a Brit: ?Then I?ll try to keep it uniform, so that I don?t sound like ?mid-Atlantic twat.? ?
In Anderson?s childhood imagination, America was sunny and glamorous. When her family moved back to the U.S., to Grand Rapids, Michigan, the reality was somewhat different: the city was cold and comparatively provincial. Having enrolled in middle school, it dawned on Anderson that she had a certain cachet as an outsider. ?Suddenly, everyone wanted to be my friend, and I took advantage of it,? she told me. ?Everyone wanted to give me gum, and then I had an expectation of gum.? Anderson was drawn to the counterculture, and found a group of friends within the city?s small but noisy punk scene. ?It felt like a scream, and that was soothing,? she said. ?The ?fuck you? form of rebelliousness?being rude to people, and flipping the bird on the street, and destroying property. I?m not proud of that aspect of it, and if my kid destroyed property I?d be bloody angry about it. But it?s the vibration underneath?the need to act out in that way. It was performative. We got something from people gawping, scowling, yelling at us.? There was, Anderson said, ?a lot of drink, and a lot of drugs, and a lot of all that kind of stuff.?
In her teens, Anderson discovered a different and more gratifying way of being noticed. While looking in the mirror, she realized that she had a capacity for self-transformation that was ?almost like shape-shifting.? There was no theatre department at her high school, but an English teacher encouraged her to get involved in the arts anyway. She mounted a production of Tom Stoppard?s ?The Real Inspector Hound,? single-handedly overseeing the casting, directing, scenery-building, program design, and ticket sales. Anderson also joined a community-theatre group, where she was cast in ?And a Nightingale Sang,? a British comedy about the Second World War. ?The experience of becoming somebody else, and then clapping, and then afterwards people going, ?Oh, my God??I went, ?Oh, I like that.? ?
Anderson went to DePaul University, in Chicago, and enrolled in its Theatre School. The program was challenging?thirty-six freshmen were accepted, their ranks whittled down by half before graduation?and Anderson?s life was sometimes chaotic. ?I struggled,? she said. ?Most of my friends didn?t go to university.? At twenty-one, she got sober: ?I needed to slow right down.? Apart from a brief period almost two decades ago?when she learned that ?the addict was still living and breathing and ready to pounce??she has remained a teetotaller.
After graduation, Anderson moved to New York, where she lived in a tiny apartment in the West Village, back when such a thing was affordable on an aspiring actor?s waitressing salary. Anderson had dated both boys and girls, and in New York she met a woman with whom she lived for about a year. ?She was a lot older?from New York, Italian?and had worked in fashion, assisting photographers, for many years,? Anderson said. ?I was just out of uni, and we were smitten. She was like a mafioso in a woman?s body, but with a big, generous heart. Great sense of style?the quintessential nineties New York lesbian-community white Levi?s and Gucci loafers.? The relationship fell apart, but they remained in touch. A few years ago, her ex died, of a brain tumor, and Anderson went public about the relationship, both to honor her former girlfriend?s memory and to acknowledge ?the importance of that relationship in my personal trajectory and sense of self.?
Anderson has since had male partners, but, she told me, ?gender hasn?t meant anything, really, one way or another, in terms of attraction.? She added, ?In the periods of time when I have been with women, it has felt temporary in my head, no matter how I might be showing up in the relationship. Whereas that has not been the case when I have been in a relationship with men.? Anderson has been married twice, and for the past eight years?except for a short break?she has been with Peter Morgan, the creator of ?The Crown.? ?We do not live together,? she said. ?But, when I am not with my kids or on set, we are together. It?s perfect for us. We are both incredibly independent and workaholics, and need that space. Best of all worlds. I highly recommend it.?
When Anderson first moved to New York, her initial ambition, to be a successful stage actress, seemed to be heading toward fulfillment: in 1991, she was cast at the last minute in a production of ?Absent Friends,? the Alan Ayckbourn drama, at the Manhattan Theatre Club, after Mary-Louise Parker dropped out. The Times raved that Anderson, playing a ?sullen malcontent,? was ?hilarious, if frightening.? She failed to secure another role, though, and eventually followed a boyfriend to Los Angeles, where she auditioned for film and television instead. Her first TV appearance was in 1993, in an episode of a short-lived drama on Fox, ?Class of ?96,? about a group of Ivy League freshmen. Anderson played an English major who, when discussing literature with a male student, says, ?Look at one of the most feminine novels ever written, ?Pride and Prejudice.? The end of that book is like the female orgasm?lots of highs, lots of lows, and no single clear resolution. Lots of potentially limitless climaxes.? The scene?a time capsule of the pro-sex feminism of the early nineties?culminates with her planting a kiss on her classmate. It was just about the only show of eroticism that the young Anderson displayed onscreen.
Later that year, she was cast in the role that defined her for almost a decade. ?The X-Files??in which Anderson and Duchovny endlessly encountered inconclusive evidence of extraterrestrial life?was all about withholding, and Anderson?s artfully masked performance was perhaps the most satisfying manifestation of this theme. Two dozen episodes were filmed each year, and Duchovny told me that Anderson ?wasn?t going to let the crazy amount of work get in the way of doing good work,? adding, ?She was always very meticulous about not moving on until she was satisfied that it was up to an interior standard.? When I relayed these comments to Anderson, she laughed. ?David was able to hold it really lightly, which I only learned to do years later,? she said. ?But, yeah, there was a long time where I properly did care about the first two hundred episodes.?
In her private life, Anderson was navigating her first marriage?to Clyde Klotz, an art director on the show?and early motherhood. While shooting Season 1, she became pregnant with her daughter, who was reared largely in Anderson?s trailer. (Anderson split from Klotz when the girl was still a toddler.) Meanwhile, Scully?s pointedly straitlaced manner proved more alluring to viewers than anyone had expected. ?Because Scully, or me playing Scully, became a sex symbol of sorts, the idea of fantasy?and me being part of fantasy?has been out there since my twenties,? she said. ?On the one hand, in my early career, I just didn?t understand it?it didn?t make any sense to me at all, particularly since I was playing a very buttoned-up, nerdy scientist. With a couple of the early photo shoots I did, the point of them was showing the opposite of that, and blasting through that preconception.? She posed in lingerie, lace, and rubber for the magazine FHM, and on Jon Stewart?s MTV talk show she exchanged bawdy banter about ?The Sex Files,? a porn parody of her series. ?But, by the same token, I was a young mother, working ridiculous hours, and not feeling connected in any way, shape, or form to what was being projected onto me.?
When ?The X-Files? ended its run, in 2002, Anderson might have stayed in Malibu and developed a career in Hollywood as a film actor. She had made a few features during the show?s down periods, including, in 2000, Terence Davies?s adaptation of ?The House of Mirth,? in which she played Lily Bart, Edith Wharton?s tragic heroine. To watch the movie now, through the lens of Anderson?s subsequent dramatic renown, is to see how incrementally she conveys Lily?s gradual demise?her failure to capitalize on the privilege of her beauty, and her unwillingness to engage in the kind of ruthlessness that comes easily to her inconstant benefactors. At the time, though, the casting of a genre actor in a period drama was itself the cause of some mirth, and some reviewers were unimpressed. Stephen Holden, in the Times, witheringly declared that Anderson ?projects none of the innate refinement necessary for Lily,? describing her as a ?big-boned redhead.? (She is a delicate five feet three.) Anderson was devastated. ?I wanted to quit,? she said. ?I thought, If that?s what happens when I put everything of myself into something, I am not meant to be doing this.?
Instead, she moved to the U.K. and embarked on what was effectively a second career, as a British actor. ?In the U.S., no A-list actors did TV in that period?it was considered beneath them,? she explained. Anderson was inspired by the example of actors such as Helen Mirren and Judi Dench: ?They would move between TV, theatre, and film, and they weren?t thought less of for it. They?d do theatre, and your jaw would be on the ground. And they?d do Sunday-night costume drama, and their level of respect was maintained. Their talent was bigger than the medium. I thought, Those are real actors.? Before long, she was cast as Lady Dedlock in a serialized adaptation of Charles Dickens?s ?Bleak House?; her ability to conceal and betray a character?s secrets behind a barely moving visage was expertly deployed. A few years later, she appeared in an adaptation of ?Great Expectations,? with a critically acclaimed turn as a younger than usual Miss Havisham. As the Guardian admiringly put it, Anderson?s take on the character was ?quietly sad, bitter and vengeful, cruelly manipulative, and more than a little potty.?
In 2013, having established her costume-drama bona fides, Anderson took on another contemporary role: that of Detective Superintendent Stella Gibson, in the thriller series ?The Fall.? Set in Northern Ireland, the show, which was created by Allan Cubitt, broke with genre convention by revealing from the first episode the identity of the serial killer, Paul Spector, whose crimes the story chronicles. It was not a whodunnit but, rather, an exploration of the mind of a sexual murderer?and the mind of his dogged pursuer. ?The Fall? ran for three memorable seasons, culminating in an interview between Gibson and Spector that unfolded for more than twelve minutes?an eternity in television. ?It was very exciting to be in an acting standoff with someone like Gillian,? Jamie Dornan told me.
As Dana Scully had been two decades earlier, Stella Gibson was a new kind of woman on television. She brought to bear a psychoanalytically informed understanding of the childhood experiences that underlay her quarry?s motives and methods, and she drew on her own past?it was revealed that she?d lost her father as a teen-ager?to get inside the heads of Spector and those close to him. She also possessed a confident sexuality, effortlessly initiating encounters with both men and women. Not incidentally, she owned a wardrobe the likes of which Agent Scully could never have imagined. Gibson stalked the grittiest streets of Belfast in narrow skirts and high heels, and inspired a desire among legions of television viewers for shimmering silk blouses in unbesmirched shades of cream and rose.
Playing Gibson, Anderson said, helped her unlock something about herself. ?It wasn?t until ?The Fall? that I actually even felt like I came into my body, and took ownership of myself as a sensual, sexual being,? she told me. ?When you are acting as if you are a certain way, experiencing that for a few hours a day?being conscious of the male gaze, conscious of how you feel, and how you are projecting yourself, both for the audience and for the other characters in the show?it was ever present, in a way that I hadn?t really experienced before, in a character or in my life.?
Anderson was also having breakthroughs onstage: in 2014, she played Blanche DuBois in a production of ?A Streetcar Named Desire,? at the Young Vic. The role was one that she had aspired to perform for years. ?It felt like she lived in me since the first time I became aware of her, at university,? Anderson told me. As she had done onscreen, she produced powerful emotional effects with apparently minimal choices: Blanche?s hands fluttered at the wrist, a gesture that at first appeared to be an affectation of elegance but grew to look more like a hopeless attempt to bat away the intolerable imperatives of reality. Wearing high heels even when in slippers, she teetered physically and emotionally; gradually, her command of the trappings of femininity failed her, and by the play?s end her lipstick was smeared across her face. The production?s director, Benedict Andrews, told me, ?Gillian had a great understanding of Blanche?s absolute need, her hunger, and the addiction that drives the character. She understood that in her own nervous system.? The performance earned Anderson the reviews of a lifetime. In the Guardian, Susannah Clapp wrote that the play?s culmination, in which Blanche departs with contrived, shattered grace on the arm of an insane-asylum doctor, was ?a masterclass in how to make audiences weep.?
While performing at the Young Vic, Anderson told me, she was able to remain attached to her own life, especially in her role as a parent. But when the show transferred to St. Ann?s Warehouse, in Brooklyn, Blanche?s instability loomed dangerously close. ?My whole existence was the play,? she said. On days when there was a matinee, her co-star Vanessa Kirby, who played Stella, would pick up lunch for her, Anderson explained, ?because even at one o?clock in the afternoon being in the proximity of other human beings was too much?I was so in the world of the play.? Onstage, she ?experienced a level of presence that felt like a spiritual experience,? she recalled. ?It was magical, otherworldly. It was like I was in her.? Anderson knew enough to recognize that there were risks to inhabiting Blanche?s derangement so completely. ?All of a sudden, I started to feel, ?Oh, shit, this isn?t fun anymore?I?m too far, I?m losing touch with me,? ? she said. She ended up finding places in the play?moments when Blanche is by herself in the bathtub, the dramatic focus elsewhere?where she ?could very simply ground myself, and get out of her.? When a third run of ?Streetcar? was proposed, Anderson knew that she couldn?t do it. ?I thought, It?s tempting fate,? she said. ?I feel like I got away with it.?
In early July, I caught up with Anderson in London, to which she had returned during a break from shooting ?The Abandons.? She was staying at Peter Morgan?s home in West London, and we sat in a spacious living room with a vantage over a large private garden; shades were drawn over the windows facing the street. Having made her home in the U.K. for more than two decades, Anderson has not so much been embraced as a transplant as she has been reabsorbed, shape-shifting from a Midwesterner back into a Londoner. Even now, she says, when she returns to her old neighborhood, in the hills of North London, the scent of its hedgerows brings her back to childhood. ?I find it so comforting,? she told me. She does not yet have a British passport?whenever she gets close to having met the residency requirements, a long stint in a place like Calgary throws things off?but she has become a firm part of the British establishment. In 2016, she received an honorary O.B.E., or Order of the British Empire, for her services to the arts. (Morgan threw a dinner party for her at a London restaurant; she wore her medal on her dress.) And in 2012, at a ceremony marking the two-hundredth anniversary of the birth of Dickens, she gave a public reading from ?Great Expectations.? The audience included Prince Charles and the Duchess of Cornwall. When Charles remarked, with pleasure, that it was like having a bedtime story read to him, Anderson said, ?I can tuck you in, too, if you like.? The future monarch replied, ?Yes, please.?
When we met in London, Anderson had just returned from the Glastonbury music festival, and her bare feet were covered with Band-Aids from wearing uncomfortable flip-flops. On her phone, she showed me photographs of the tiny shepherd?s hut where she and a friend had shared a bed?she?d waited too long to book more spacious accommodations. They?d watched Coldplay perform from an elevated V.I.P. area above the throng. She recalled, ?All of a sudden, this roar comes up behind us, and Tom Cruise has just come onto the platform. And, of course, he?s totally comfortable with this life of his, and he gestures to his people?his fans?and there are ripples and ripples, and all the phones go up. I was, like, ?Is this what it?s like all the time?? But he loves it.? Anderson showed me a video she?d later taken of Cruise waving to tens of thousands during a sing-along to Oasis?s ?Don?t Look Back in Anger.? When I pointed out that she, too, had been in the V.I.P. area, she protested, ?I just feel like a regular person. I know it?s ridiculous. But most of the time I am literally going between spending long hours on set and making my kids chicken wraps. Whereas he came in a helicopter.?
In the past few years, Anderson has attracted a significant new tranche of fans of her own, thanks to her role on the popular Netflix comedy-drama ?Sex Education,? which last year concluded its fourth and final season. The show centers on the social and sexual dynamics of a diverse group of British high schoolers, among them Otis Milburn, played by Asa Butterfield. Otis is the child of Anderson?s character, Jean Milburn, a sex therapist with shaky personal boundaries and a fondness for chic jumpsuits. To the fictional teen-agers in the show?and to the show?s TikTok-using core audience?Anderson?s character is an unfamiliar and appealing kind of parent figure: nonjudgmental, forthright, and startlingly hot. One popular clip on social media shows Jean zestfully hitting a spliff in the company of the headmaster?s delinquent son. Viewers closer to Anderson?s age appreciate that the discombobulations caused by the hormonal changes common to women in midlife?Jean learns at the end of the second season that she is both in perimenopause and pregnant?are neither ignored nor played for laughs at her expense. Anderson?s enactment of the complex emotions involved in parenting an adolescent are often poignant. When Otis complains that Jean is treating him as if he is part of her, she falteringly replies, ?Well, you are part of me.?
Anderson initially wasn?t sure if the role was right for her. Morgan encouraged her to take it on. ?He?s got really good taste, and he gets Zeitgeists at inception,? she said. ?I seriously didn?t get the humor when I first read it?I thought it was way too broad. But once I realized that Jean?s dubious moral compass was part of what would make her fun to play, rather than something that needed to be fixed, then I suddenly got it.? Nonetheless, she remained wary of taking on a role for which the crude acronym milf might have been invented. ?I told myself, ?But I?m not old enough to fit that box!? ? she said. ?But of course I was, and had been for some time.? Anderson?s sons are now the target age for ?Sex Education,? and she told me that, at a certain point, she asked them ?if their lives were made more difficult by my job, and they kind of said yes?it was embarrassing. But then we got to have a conversation about how important it was that that show was out there, and that things that were embarrassing needed to be addressed.? Both her sons have claimed that they never watched ?Sex Education,? she said. ?But I think they have.?
What Anderson has discovered?somewhat to her surprise, but also to her delight?is that the show?s themes have bled into her own life. She, no less than Jean Milburn, has become an icon of sexual frankness. The meme ?Gillian Anderson made me gay? has been adopted by L.G.B.T.Q. people in recognition of the appeal of Anderson?s characters and her public persona. She has wryly embraced the elision. For the past few years, her social-media accounts have featured images of suggestively phallic or vulval forms?a squat, bulbous mushroom; a natural rock pool surrounded by lapping waves?accompanied by the hashtags #penisoftheday or #yonioftheday. When, earlier this year, she was nominated for a Golden Globe for her work on ?Sex Education,? she wore to the ceremony an off-white dress, designed by her friend Gabriela Hearst, that was embroidered with what the Telegraph referred to as ?barely-there vaginas.? (The design concept was Anderson?s, though the subtlety was a collaborative effort. ?People really took it in a positive way,? Hearst said.) Last year, in collaboration with one of Peter Morgan?s sons, Anderson launched a line of soft drinks called G Spot. When I visited her in London, she gave me a can of a flavor called Arouse?a mixture of passion fruit and habanero chile.
This fall, Anderson is upping the ante by editing ?Want,? a collection of women?s sexual fantasies that were anonymously sent to the publisher Bloomsbury after she publicly requested submissions. The idea for the book was hatched, Anderson explained, in collaboration with her literary agent, Claire Conrad, who had been approached by several publishers asking if Anderson would be interested in writing a positive book about sex. The inspiration for the format of ?Want? is Nancy Friday?s 1973 best-seller, ?My Secret Garden,? an anthology of secret sexual desires that Friday collected through interviews and correspondence.
The fantasies in Friday?s book range from vanilla ones?an encounter at a suburban garden party, flower-picking included?to scenarios of rape, incest, and bestiality. (One of the revelations delivered by Friday was the extent to which the family dog was not exclusively man?s best friend.) There are no such contributions in ?Want?: Anderson?s publisher placed off limits anything involving characters under the age of eighteen, or anything depicting rape, graphic violence, or intolerance toward any individual or group. There is no bestiality, unless you count a contributor?s fantasy about having sex with Bigfoot. And, though there are no minors, one contributor has submitted a fantasy that includes having a threesome with the Weasley twins from the ?Harry Potter? movies. To the extent that ?Want? includes fantasies of being overcome and disempowered, they are couched in the rhetoric of safety and consent. Perhaps the most shocking aspect of ?My Secret Garden? today is how common race-based sexual fantasies were among Friday?s (presumably predominantly white) contributors, and how unremarkable Friday seems to find them. No such submissions were offered for ?Want,? Alexis Kirschbaum, Anderson?s publisher at Bloomsbury, told me.
Anderson said of the project, ?I think in this day and age, if we were to include those types of fantasies, the book would become controversial in a way that in the end might make readers and the women contributing feel unsafe.? The intention was for it to be as inclusive as possible. She went on, ?It fascinates me, because it seems to be of our time that one needs to have restrictions.? Just as Friday?s book spoke to her era, Anderson?s is reflective of contemporary sexual mores. Whereas Friday?s contributors were often troubled by their feelings of same-sex attraction, Anderson?s book includes contributions from lesbians who find themselves secretly turned on by fantasies of heterosexual encounters. And although Anderson?s nameless contributors proudly identify themselves with such descriptors as ?pansexual? or ?asexual,? some express embarrassment and shame when their urges conflict with their politics, as if the domain of fantasy ought to be?or could be?regulated by the same notions of rectitude that apply in the real world.
The experience of working on the book made Anderson think about her own sexual identity in terms she had never before considered. ?Now, at the age of fifty-five, I am thinking, Oh, am I pansexual? Am I bisexual?? she said. Had her same-sex relationships come to light when she was starting out as an actor, Anderson told me, it would have defined her in a way that might have detracted from what she sought to achieve artistically. In this era, she is careful not to overstate her sexual experience with women?not out of fear of being labelled, but in order not to be seen as appropriating an identity to which she might not truly be able to lay claim.
Having had the disconcerting experience of becoming a sex symbol in the nineties, Anderson has now attained a different kind of symbolic relevance: as an avatar of the scrupulously mindful, identity-affirming, progressive sexual politics of today. Editing ?Want,? Anderson told me in Calgary, involved some unexpected turns. ?When I started reading so many ?clit?s, it didn?t offend me, but so many feelings came up,? she said. ?The first few I read, I thought, Oh, it?s men writing these, women don?t use the word ?clit.? But apparently women really do use the word ?clit?!? She has contributed introductions to each chapter, in which she draws on her work as an actor, and her experience as a celebrity, to illustrate the power of fantasy. ?As someone who is watched for a living, I have a complicated relationship with privacy,? she writes at one point. ?If I had my druthers, I would move about the world invisibly. And indeed, at the very heart of all my own fantasies, I am the watcher, not the watched.?
Anderson herself contributed a sexual fantasy to the book?an experience, she said, that taught her something about her own boundaries and comfort levels. ?It?s one thing to have it in your head, and it?s another to express it to your partner?and it?s a whole other thing to put it on paper,? she told me late one evening in Calgary. ?I am not squeamish. I am not prudish. I feel like I have experienced a lot. And yet actually describing something myself, and putting certain words down?it was quite something.? Although Anderson?s contribution is also anonymous, she wondered aloud, as she drank her alcohol-free shandy, how she would react if a reader should divine which fantasy is hers, and ask her directly about it.
?I?d be really bad at pretending it wasn?t mine,? she said, laughing. ?I?m a really bad liar. My kids say so all the time.? I responded with surprise?if anyone can put on an act in a pinch, surely an actor can. But Anderson was insistent. ?I don?t know whether that?s a common thing among actors,? she said, her eyes wide, simultaneously guileless and mirthful. ?I have to imagine that most actors are probably really good at lying.? And then she lied: ?Maybe I?m just not that good of an actor.? ?
Published in the print edition of the August 5, 2024, issue, with the headline ?Out There.?
