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Gillian Anderson: a Retrospective Glance

Gillian Anderson, in her own words.

The Short Route

May 7, 2006:

'I'm never satisfied. That's part of me, part of my make-up.'...

[On The X-Files] 'You know, early twenties, all the emotions, and I had a baby, and then a divorce, and I was on a brand-new series that was doing well, and all the publicity surrounding that, all the nonsense about David and I, and there were times when it was unbearable.' Hastily, humbly, she adds, 'And yet, I was so fortunate to be a part of something that was so exceptional. We did have fun.'

'I do try, very hard, to be happy where I am, I work extra-hard at it, but it's difficult for me, because what is around me is not enough.'

...She describes her current house as 'big and open and white. My... [there's a long pause, while she works out the correct term] husband liked white walls. I like white walls, too. A mixture of funky but mostly standard elements, contemporary, but classic. Then the one before that, off Portobello Road, I just went mad with colour. Spent an exorbitant amount of money on layers and layers of paint. Very funky, bohemian, Moroccan. One before that, in Canada, lots of wood and glass, looking out at the ocean, very grounding.' An eternal cycle of reinvention.

February 24, 2025:

It wasn’t until probably about 15 years ago, when I played Stella Gibson in The Fall, that I started to pay attention to fashion and beauty—the quality of her clothes, her sensuality, and how she put herself together. It was through playing her that I started to actually feel that paying attention to it felt good, and how good it felt to be in those clothes, connected to a sense of personal power because of how one presents. So, I feel like I’ve come to it quite late in my life, and it’s interesting that this opportunity would also come to me quite late in my life.

[During the early years]: Interestingly, Scully wasn’t connected to beauty at all. She wore a lot of single-color polyester pantsuits, which were made fun of by people, especially in retrospect. Scully’s style was a reflection of her character. She wasn’t trying to be glamorous or fit into traditional beauty standards. Her minimalist look and sharp, elegant clothes were a form of strength. It wasn’t about appearance; it was about being intelligent, strong, and independent.

...Back then, it felt less glamorous than it had in previous eras and less glamorous than it is now. But honestly, I prefer the glamour of today, if I’m being honest.

The Long Route

AMBITIONS AND PRIVATE LIFE

October 1994 (first interview):

EXTRA: O.K. are we ready. I'm going to ask you some extra questions from America Online and then we'll get to the other ones if we have time. Now are you a skeptic or are you a believer in the UFO?

GILLIAN: In real life? Oh in real life. Me as Gillian Anderson I have a tendency to be more of a believer than a skeptic. There certainly things that I am hesitant about but I have always had a fascination with some kind of a belief system with psychokinesis and E.S.P. and astro-projection and life after death and all that wonderful stuff.

1996:

Because the play in New York would have conflicted with other projects, Anderson opted to make a two-for-one swap and take the other two parts, doing the movie and then “The Philanthropist”. As it turned out, the latter ultimately led her to Los Angeles after she became involved with another actor on the show, following him to the West Coast and eventually moving in with him. “I’m not sure if I hadn’t made those choices that I would be doing The X-Files right now,” she muses.

..."The X-Files”, in fact, was the only pilot for which Anderson auditioned in 1993, at that point possessing little knowledge regarding what the whole process entailed. She even had to ask her manager what a pilot was and had no idea that each network commissions about four times as many pilots as they end up ordering as series. “I naively assumed that we were going to be picked up,” she says, with the hope that landing the part and doing 13 episodes of a TV show (the number networks order for starters) would put her in a different echelon of casting. She anticipated at most committing a year to the project.

May 19-25, 2001:

For the record: She was not originally blonde; she does have a dog, but it's a King Charles spaniel, not a Jack Russell terrier; and she has been nicotine-free for just over a year. "It isn't as hard as I imagined it would be," she says of kicking the habit. "I am in a state of grace with it."

A practicing Buddhist, Anderson seems to be in a state of grace with life overall. And although she enjoyed directing an episode of The X-Files, she says it's so time-consuming that she can't imagine doing it again until Piper is at least 16. But Anderson makes no secret of the fact that she's ready to move on. When her contract expires after next season, she wants to return to the stage.

January 22, 2006:

Anderson says she did take a year off to travel with boyfriend-now-husband Julian Ozanne, a photojournalist and filmmaker....

Anderson also engaged in charity work overseas, including with an organization called Artists for a New South Africa....

May 7, 2006:

She [Gillian Anderson] seems to have had it with theatre. 'Usually when I do a play - and this is why I don't do them very often - you start rehearsals, it's all great fun, then you get halfway through and you think, "...it's too hard, too stressful." And then you get over that and it's fine, and then you absolutely love it for a couple of weeks, and then you start thinking, "...is this ever going to end?" and then you realise it's not going to end and you have to make the best of every night. And then you start to learn again, and you do that for a little while... and then you get to the place where you're like, "...it's going to be over soon, and this is such a wonderful experience!"' She forks in some duck salad. 'I'm never satisfied. That's part of me, part of my make-up.'

...Gossip has had the pair [Anderson and Ozanne] splitting for a while; she put out the lawyers' statement in the hope that 'it might change the dynamic if people just knew it, outright'. In the expectation that you might be able to take back some control? 'One hopes so.' Anderson hails a waiter, asks if she's allowed to smoke in here. No, she's not. 'I don't know why, I'm dying for a cigarette....'

'You know, early twenties, all the emotions, and I had a baby, and then a divorce, and I was on a brand-new series that was doing well, and all the publicity surrounding that, all the nonsense about David and I, and there were times when it was unbearable.' Hastily, humbly, she adds, 'And yet, I was so fortunate to be a part of something that was so exceptional. We did have fun.'

'I do try, very hard, to be happy where I am, I work extra-hard at it, but it's difficult for me, because what is around me is not enough.' Four years ago, she went through a really good stage, she was 'really, really happy', and there's a long, dreamy pause while she drifts off, remembering this happy time, and then she comes to and says, briskly, 'Yeah, but I was doing loads of yoga and meditation. I was going to say I was eating wholefoods a lot, but I think I was living off frozen yogurt.'

...Her chief recreation is 'buying houses, doing them up, selling them up for a little bit more. Structurally, working with architects, interiors, I love that stuff. I've done it a lot. Twice in London, twice in Canada, twice in California.' Ah, that dissatisfied impulse again. I'll bet she's already starting to think about the sale of the marital home around the corner, and the next purchase.

She describes her current house as 'big and open and white. My... [there's a long pause, while she works out the correct term] husband liked white walls. I like white walls, too. A mixture of funky but mostly standard elements, contemporary, but classic. Then the one before that, off Portobello Road, I just went mad with colour. Spent an exorbitant amount of money on layers and layers of paint. Very funky, bohemian, Moroccan. One before that, in Canada, lots of wood and glass, looking out at the ocean, very grounding.' An eternal cycle of reinvention.

February 25, 2017:

There were occasions during that series [The X-Files] when I wasn’t sure whether I could go on. I started having panic attacks on a daily basis while we were shooting, around the time Piper was born. It was a mixture of not having dealt with childhood problems, the work being intensive, living in the spotlight and the expectation on me, as well as not knowing how to get balance or properly take care of myself. The panic attacks forced me to start practising meditation, just to eke out a tiny bit of space for myself, and that made it possible to continue.

Gillian and Clyde divorced after three years (she later said she had been too young and has encouraged her daughter to travel and ‘make the most of her life’ before getting seriously involved with a man), and she was briefly married to Julian Ozanne, a filmmaker. She then fell in love with Mark Griffiths, a businessman, with whom she has two sons, Oscar, ten, and Felix, eight.

Despite achieving fame on both sides of the Atlantic, she remained insecure: ‘For years I was very self-centred and focused on my body, my weight, and it caused so much sadness. That really moves me now, just how much of my younger life I missed out on because I was so focused on my thighs or my outfit; it was such a waste of time.’

Obsessing about appearance is part of the career she chose, Gillian concedes, ‘but it’s becoming the world we all operate in because of social media. Facebook and Instagram have made all women focus on how they look and how they’re represented.’

...Motherhood brought its own pressures, especially for Gillian, who finds the noise and chaos of young boys unbearable at times. Maybe other mothers have ‘tougher nerve endings’, she says. She does the ‘right thing’ and gets down to play Lego but ‘my kids can sense it’s not easy for me. I struggled when Piper was little as well. I remember getting restless and feeling this pressure that I should be doing something else, but when I was doing something else feeling this pressure that I should be with my child. It’s that constant tug of war…and I don’t think I’m alone with that. I try to be tolerant and patient. How I am in the house depends on my time of the month: I’m either embracing of the noise or it’s nails on a chalk board. But they know that it’s just Mum. There’s an acceptance and a lovingness.’

...‘Independence-wise being an only child is good, but there are traits that I have seen in other only children: being quite selfish, not really wanting to share. It’s taken a long time for me to push the boundaries of those and be less controlling, less protective of my world and my space.’

...Gillian saw a pattern with her partners: ‘I’d meet someone, instantly fall in love and spend every waking hour with them, but stopped doing the things I enjoyed doing, stopped taking care of myself. I adopted their interests, friends, music, tastes…before long I’d start to resent them, even though it was me who actively let myself go.’

After six years together, she and Mark split up (they didn’t marry) and she has used some of the experience of her dealings with her ex in her book. ‘A spiritual adviser encouraged me to start thinking of [him] as my “beloved”, that regardless of our separateness we will be raising two children together for the rest of our lives and that makes him one of the most important people in my life, whether I like it or not. As you can imagine, this is not easy, but the times I am able to communicate with him from a place of love and appreciation rather than resentment, or as he says “againstness”, the more my perception shifts.’

MOVING ABOUT THE GLOBE

“First of all, I swore I’d never move to Los Angeles,” she admits, “and once I did, I swore I’d never do television. It was only after being out of work for almost a year that I began going in [to audition] on some stuff that I would pray that I wouldn’t get because I didn’t want to be involved in it.”

February 1998:

Born in Chicago to Rosemary and Edward Anderson, Gillian accompanied the family to Puerto Rico before settling in London, where her father studied film production. Her mother says she was adventurous and welcomed “new experiences.”

“One of my very favorite stories happened when we were in London,” Rosemary Anderson recalls. “It was her first day of nursery school. Her father was taking her down the stairs and she looked back up at me, saw my face and said, ‘Don’t cry, Mom.’ She was fine. I was not.”

After nine years, the Andersons returned to America and settled in Grand Rapids.

“By the time I was 11, I had been on 40-some planes,” the actress says, lighting another cigarette. “I remember my parents taking me to parties a lot. Running around, then falling asleep. Having my pajamas on and being carried to the car. … Some of my greatest memories are of them shoving me in the back of a VW Bug and sleeping on the way home.”

July 19, 1998:

The 1,000-mile commute was wearing him down. "We're [David Duchovny and Tea Leoni] like passing ships in the night because of our different schedules," he said at the time. His co-star Gillian Anderson supported the move, adding, "I love Vancouver. I think it's a beautiful city. But it is not and never has felt like home. Los Angeles feels like home."

1998:

During a brief break, Anderson, looking radiant in a long red cocktail dress, said she was invigorated by filming in Southern California.

“It’s really been going great, and the episodes are really good this season,” she said. “It’s really made a difference for me being here. I have a lot of friends and a great support system.”

Anderson added: “The sunshine does have a lot to do with my mood, feeling healthy and whole. It’s nice to sit out in the sunshine with my daughter.”

March 2001:

leolady19682001: Hi Gillian, how are you? when you're in London do you feel like you're coming home? or is living in London a distant memory?

gillian_anderson_live: I always feel like I'm coming home when I go to London. It's one of the places where I feel most at home. I hope to eventually live there, part-time, again.

November 8, 2003:

All I know is that for my whole life I have been pulled towards the African Continent. I was born in America, live in London and my heart is in Africa.

January 22, 2006:

Anderson says she did take a year off to travel with boyfriend-now-husband Julian Ozanne, a photojournalist and filmmaker. The two married in Kenya in late 2004 and have visited 30 countries in three years -- among them, Lebanon, Syria, India, Sri Lanka, Russia, Romania. Some of those places are considered risky travel destinations.

"They consider Beirut to be the Paris of the Middle East, and it certainly is," Anderson says. "It's a beautiful, beautiful city that also still shows signs of the devastation that has gone on for years and years. Every other building has blown-out windows. But it wasn't scary."

Anderson also engaged in charity work overseas, including with an organization called Artists for a New South Africa....

May 7, 2006:

She married Julian Ozanne - who was the FT's Africa bureau chief and is now a financial consultant and a director of a biofuels company - in Lamu's Shella island, off Kenya's Indian Ocean coast in December 2004.

...But she and Piper will remain in London? 'Yeah. For now. And maybe we'll be here in 20 years. Or maybe I'll fall in love with Spain. Or India. Who knows? Things are all changing right now.... '

August 2006:

Are you staying in London?

Yes, we [Gillian and Piper Anderson] are. We've been here for four years, so this is home - for now, anyway.

You grew up in the UK until you were nine and you live here now, and your daughter is growing up here, going to school here. Do you feel more British or American?

Neither. When I'm here, I'm conscious of having an American sensibility, but when I'm there I don't fit in, I feel more British. I have different conversations here. I meet people who are intelligent and well-informed and interesting, but there's more reluctance to be personal, to discuss the ways we feel and think. But it is changing. Even in the four years I've been here I've seen that begin to shift.

January 2016:

We made 202 episodes in the end, over nine seasons, and worked long 16-, 17-hour days. David and I were in almost every scene for years - often at night, in the rain, on location. So much of it was shot in the dark, with us lighting ourselves by flashlight, in all kinds of weather, and in the forest. Oh, the forests. When the show finally moved to Los Angeles I can’t say we missed them, or the weather, but Vancouver really did set the mood for the show in a fundamental way.

FASHION AND SELF-IMAGE

July 10, 1998:

WHAT’S UP WITH SCULLY’S WARDROBE (I)? Not that we’re complaining, but when did the dowdy agent develop such killer fashion sense? Is it a side effect of alien abduction? “In the beginning of the series, I was into the frumpy FBI agent look, but I got tired of it pretty quickly,” Anderson says. “I’ve been paying more attention to my clothes. And with the movie, we had more money, so we could start doing things with Italian fabrics and stuff.”

August 2006:

Were you drawn to the Scully character - was she like you?

I did bring a lot of myself to her. I wanted her to be a different kind of character. It was more important to me that her dress sense was conservative and frumpy, that she was kind of awkward with that side of thing, it wasn't what she was about.

February 8, 2015:

Was she surprised to be voted sexiest woman on the planet? She answers in single-word sentences. “It. Means. Absolutely. Nothing. If you look at all the pictures of me back then I had the worst hair, I was the worst dressed, I never put any time or energy into how I looked in public, never put makeup on, never even got out of my house trousers.... So what’s it based on? It’s surely not based on Scully and her three-piece suit and her awkward hair and the pink pastel Lycra suit, so what is it?”

You?

“But no one knew me,” she protests.

She says it’s only over the past three years that she’s paid any attention to her appearance.

January 2016:

For the 2015 reboot of six episodes, the question naturally came up: to dye or not to dye? My hair was already falling out from playing so many platinums (Stella in The Fall, Bedelia in Hannibal, Blanche in A Streetcar Named Desire), so “wig” was the answer.

Cut to day two of filming in the heart of downtown Vancouver (taking the role of Washington, DC), smack in the middle of lunch hour. We were drawing crowds, and these days “crowds” means phones, photographs and instant internet activity. A close-up of my hair was immediately posted online: “It’s not the right red!” (outrage); “The parting is wrong!” (disgust). Fans ,who know more about the show than any of us making it, were spot on - they had been watching Scully right from the show’s beginning - and a new wig was made....

One thing that was going to be different this time around, though: Scully’s wardrobe. During the original series, I had paid not a lick of attention to her style. I had known that I wanted her to be homely, because I was determined to be a real actress who didn’t care about vanity. But little did I realise that my lack of awareness would lead to years of bad hair and polyester suits. To be fair, the show’s costume girl was great and was simply pulling outfits from what was on offer in the mid-Nineties: fabrics that I can’t even think of without shivers running up my spine; double-breasted suits and shoulder pads as big as a house. Scully’s taste got better as the seasons went on, but it wasn’t really until the sixth season when we moved down to Los Angeles and a new team came on board, that I was forced to address the issue, head-on. New, hipper clothes and a slicker haircut for Scully. Even a leather coat, here and there.

This time around, after 13 years of creating other characters and realising that I not only have a say in how they appear but that I actually enjoy that part of the process - I have strong opinions about how my characters express themselves through clothes - I worked much more actively with The X-Files wardrobe designer Chris Hargadon to hone Scully’s style. I had worked with Chris on Hannibal, in which he got to express his creative genius through Hannibal’s fine tailoring.

February 2019:

One morning a decade ago, Gillian Anderson started crying about the cruelty of ageing and didn’t stop until evening. “If you watch yourself on film, there is a certain point you see yourself... change. It’s arresting,” she says, sitting on a velvet sofa at home, dressed in black, her stiletto boots tucked under her, and with such fine features it’s as if she’s been drawn with a very sharp pencil. “It can either be completely traumatic or something that instigates a shift of consciousness towards thinking about what’s important. But you have to go through that trauma first, to mourn.”

Anderson takes a sip of tea. “The thing to remember is, how one looks in the mirror is the youngest one will ever look again. So you can’t do anything but celebrate it! Ageing is something we all need to find a way to embrace – the inevitability of age, of decline, of… rot.” She cackles, hearing herself, a well-attired goth contemplating death on a winter afternoon.

February 24, 2025:

...Interestingly, Scully wasn’t connected to beauty at all. She wore a lot of single-color polyester pantsuits, which were made fun of by people, especially in retrospect. Scully’s style was a reflection of her character. She wasn’t trying to be glamorous or fit into traditional beauty standards. Her minimalist look and sharp, elegant clothes were a form of strength. It wasn’t about appearance; it was about being intelligent, strong, and independent.

...Back then, it felt less glamorous than it had in previous eras and less glamorous than it is now. But honestly, I prefer the glamour of today, if I’m being honest.

FLUCTUATING INTEREST IN SCULLY AND THE X-FILES

1996:

Despite what she now calls her “very snobby view of doing television versus film,” Anderson read the pilot script for “The X-Files” and found herself immediately drawn to both the character of Dana Scully and her relationship with fellow FBI agent Fox Mulder.

November 1998:

“It’s incredibly gratifying,” says Anderson of what it’s been like to play Dana Scully. “It would have been harder to stick with it were I not playing such an intelligent, such an interesting, and multidimensional character as Scully is. When I read the pilot, I was struck how unlike a TV script it was and, also, by how complicated and interesting the relationship was between Mulder and Scully. I think that more than anything,” she continues, “[it was] her intelligence and her strength in standing up to Mulder and feeling confident about expressing her beliefs in front of somebody who was touted as being near God in terms of his work at the FBI.”

November 2000:

And that's where the real push came in her contract negotiations, which hinged on her belief that her pay versus Duchovny's was too unfair. "At the end of the fifth year, it became just ridiculous and unacceptable that there was the disparity," she says. "So we took steps to remedy that and we were successful. Then there was the issue whereby I was already signed on for the eighth season and David was not, which put him in a better position. "He was in a better leveraging position," she says candidly.

"Therefore, in order to get what he felt was fair, he agreed to do the eighth season. Conversely, I had to do what I felt was fair. Fox was asking for a ninth season and I said no. "And they said, 'well if you're not going to do a ninth season then we're not going to pay you what you want.' So in order to negotiate fairly, I had to agree to do the ninth year."

"There's no two ways about it. I was over a barrel, a very big barrel. And it was uncomfortable, you know, to be in that position. Here's a company that I had worked so hard for for so long and I put a lot of time and energy into doing the best work that I could.

"For them to come to me and say, 'Well, you know, forget about that. This is what we need right now and we don't care what your needs are. This is what we need in order for you to be compensated,' it was unfair," she says without hesitation. "We worked it out in the end but it was incredibly uncomfortable and unfortunate."

Still, she did so begrudgingly.

January-February 2001:

GA: ...I do think that over time, as I have changed and matured and gotten more comfortable with myself, so has Scully. And there's also a difference now that Mulder is temporarily gone. She seems more well rounded somehow. With Mulder around, there was always a piece of Scully that was...

Interview: Suppressed?

GA: Yeah, in a way. When you're in a relationship with someone, no matter how much you fight to maintain a sense of self, when that relationship is over, there's always a piece that comes back to you. And I fee that's kind of what's happened.

January 18, 2002:

The future of “X-Files” has been a topic around Fox for much of the last few seasons, as both Duchovny and Anderson expressed a desire to move on. Duchovny worked half of the episodes last season. And Anderson, who wanted to leave earlier in the show’s run, was contractually forced to work this year.

Like Anderson, viewers may already have had enough.

May 10, 2002:

Dave Letterman: What was it like when you got together to get ready to go for the final time there?

Gillian Anderson: Well, I think I expected it to be a lot more emotional than it actually was. Like a week beforehand I started saying this is the last day that we are filming at the studio; this is the last day that this person is going to touch up my lips; this is the last...you know, you start to take in those things. And after a while, you just go blank...it just gets kind of blank. And ah, ... blank. Kinda like I am right now, blank.

Dave Letterman: You did that to sort of protect yourself from the real emotions of it, you think?

Gillian Anderson: I think so. And I also think that it is somewhat unfathomable, you know. And I think that I am so used to the routine and I am also used to going on hiatus that probably come July, when I would normally go back, is when I'll start to feel it.

July 2002:

And now it's over, and she's not quite sure how she feels about that. "Don't get me started. I don't know why, but I woke up feeling so emotional today. It's so surreal.... it's only starting to hit me over the past couple of days. And it just feels like nine years was so short. You know what I mean? While we were in the middle of it I felt that it would never end, and now it's just all of a sudden... it just feels unfathomable. And that's all I have to say."

It sounds as if she might be having second thoughts about Chris Carter's decision, but ultimately she realizes this is the moment to call it a day. "No, no, no. I think ultimately that it's good to finish now. There's a time for everything to end, and I think this is the right time. I think it's good for everybody and I think that everybody has put in such a huge effort over the years in really trying to keep the quality of the show up and to continue with its integrity as much as it can. Now everybody in their own way is excited about moving on to other things. Both things can co-exist. One can be sad and in the process of mourning and at the same time be excited and hopeful for the future and change."

August 2002:

While many originally perceived The X-Files as being all about Mulder's quest, in the end, it was clear that the show was as much about Scully's quest as well. Cancer, abduction, infertility (and its mysterious reversal) were just some of the story threads that affected Scully directly. "I think the show certainly did start out just as Mulder's quest; the show was primarily about his character and his genius and his revelation. And Scully's job was to kind of help solidify that in the questions that she would answer."

Together, she adds, "they created a whole." The path toward having Scully carry as much weight in the stories as Mulder was a gradual one, though, she recalls, laughing. "It was 70-30, then 60-40, then 50-50.

In seasons eight and nine, the fact that the saga of The X-Files completed its morph into revolving around Scully's journey is something that Anderson feels, "happened by necessity, because of the fact that David was going to be leaving. And I think for the first year that he was gone, the writers did a very good job of keeping him in the public consciousness even though he wasn't around."

After two years of will-they-or-won't-they return false starts, the reality that the end is near has struck the red-haired actress full force. "I woke up feeling so emotional today," Anderson admits on a bright Friday afternoon, with just four more episodes -- including the show's two-hour finale -- still to shoot. "This is surreal. It's only started to hit me these past couple of days. It feels like nine years was so short. While we were in the middle of it, I thought it would never end. Now, all of a sudden, it's just unfathomable."

January 22, 2006:

Anderson says that nine seasons of the science-fiction/paranormal hit just sapped too much from of her real life. So stepped out of the Hollywood grind and headed to London, perhaps led by memories of a childhood spent there. She bought a house and met the man she married. "I know what it's like to do things that are soul-decaying," she says. "And a lot of, you know, a large aspect of life in Hollywood, in a stereotypic way, I find soul-decaying. And I choose, albeit frustratingly to other people in my life, not to expose myself to too much of that. And what that has translated into is that I live in a country that I absolutely love, in a city that I am awakened by and educated by on a daily basis."

...After tackling Edith Wharton and now Dickens, it's easy to imagine that she has a bookcase filled with Penguin Classics at home. But she was unfamiliar with Bleak House till she was approached for the project. Most of her upcoming work, she says, is contemporary. For her, it's all about good writing.

August 2008:

So, what's it been like pinning on your FBI badges again?

Gillian Anderson: It's been good. But hard work. It's been a long time since I've done such a long shoot – I've chosen things between three and six weeks, and this has been the first time for ages that I've done two-and-a-half months. David has a lot of physical stuff to do in the film, and I feel like on the one hand I've gotten off easy and on the other hand I'm still exhausted. I just feel old. (Laughs) ...The shoot was pretty gruelling on everyone. The cold, the long nights... Some of the crew were saying it was the hardest one they'd ever done. I got pretty sick, and at one point my son had scratched my cornea, so I was doing shots with a red eye and snot coming out of my nose. Look out for those ones.

A lot of fans were unhappy with the way it ended, which was, it has to be said, with a whimper rather than a bang. Do you concede that they have a point?

Anderson: You know what? By the time it was done I couldn't even have a conversation about it. I don't have enough of a perspective to say whether questions were answered or whether it was all wrapped up, and honestly, there's part of me that doesn't care. I'm sympathetic to die-hard fans who might feel left in short shrift, but...

Feb 2016:

Was it easy to convince you to film this new season?

I didn't like the idea at first. When we were shooting the show twenty years ago, we were young, grateful, ready to give it our all, and we had no personal lives. Today, I have three children, a husband, and various commitments. So the producers and Fox did everything they could to make things easier for me. And I signed on…

... I really liked the idea of giving fans what they've been wanting for a long time. Namely, the return of the two heroes, but also all the ingredients that made the series a success, from its mythology to the "monster of the week" and its comedic aspects. There too, I think we succeeded in this challenge.

So The X-Files would definitely be a television series, not a movie franchise...

A series—as everyone in the audiovisual world agrees today—offers the freedom to develop a main plot, but also its ramifications, its characters, their connections, and many other aspects. Chris Carter, for example, explored throughout The X-Files a mythology and a subtle sense of irony that one, two, or even three movies cannot capture. All of this is reflected in the new series.

December 28, 2015:

...Anderson’s being back on The X-Files seems oddly seamless.

Indeed, she’s somewhat surprised it’s taken this long to happen. Along with Duchovny and X-Files creator Chris Carter, she always thought there could be a third feature film. “I think we realized that we needed to wrap up the story in some way,” she suggested. But “we got to a point where that was clearly not going to be possible.” Certainly not on TV, since neither actor could imagine going back to 20-plus episodes a year. But once networks began to see that short stacks of series could be a feasible formula, the three of them were ready to try.

January 2016:

Sure, there have been X-Files movies, but when the last season ended it seemed unlikely there would ever be a television series again. Until recently, a new show would have meant making another 24 episodes - something not remotely possible for David or me. So it wasn’t until TV networks became more open-minded about shorter series that it even became a possibility. David took the lead and ran with it, but it took me a while to catch up. In other words: over my dead body. But I reconsidered, and it suddenly started to sound as if it might be the only feasible way for us to achieve closure while giving the fans a taste of what they had been clamouring for. Also, I figured it might possibly be quite fun.

...If we didn’t know it already by the time we wrapped this latest series, David and I were both profoundly aware of how lucky we have been. How fortunate we are to have played these two characters who have had such an impact on television, defined a genre, found affection with so many people - and lasted for so many years.

February 22, 2017:

You don’t miss it at all, something that’s been a huge part of your life. And actually, life-changing?

Um. I wouldn’t say I miss it [The X-Files], no. I mean, there are other… things that I’ve done that I would say that I miss more. And I don’t know how much of it is because I played her for so such a long time that I… that it doesn’t feel…. It was long enough, in a sense. I miss… I would say I miss Blanche in Streetcar more than I miss Scully or even Stella from The Fall. Yeah, there are characters that I miss.

April 4, 2024:

So does that mean Anderson, 55, will put her dark suit back on as FBI agent Scully to investigate more shadowy cases involving the paranormal?

“There’s a chance it will happen,” she said. “Whether I’m involved in it is a whole other thing. But in his hands — but I’m not saying no — because I think (Coogler) is really cool, and I think if he did it, it would probably be done incredibly well, and maybe I’ll pop in for a little somethin-somethin.”

November 2024:

A teenaged William became a key figure in the overarching Season 11 narrative, while Scully became a more passive character by the end of the season (leading to the announcement of yet another surprise pregnancy in the Season 11 finale). “It felt like Scully’s trajectory was no longer one of strength and agency,” Anderson said on the podcast. “It felt like it was beholden to an old idea of what a woman is… Literally all she could talk about was William and finding William. That’s literally a one-track song.”

Anderson also said that “I wasn’t really enjoying the direction that it was heading… and I didn’t have a voice in it. And so I felt like I needed to move on to something where I might have more of a voice.”

Additionally, Anderson and Duchovny touched on the fact that in 2000, Duchovny also quit the show without discussing it with Anderson first, something for which he took the opportunity to apologize. But she said that, “[At the time], I thought at first I thought, well, then we’re both going to [quit], because clearly I can’t go on without him. I don’t think I blamed you at all. I don’t think I was upset.”

April 16, 2025:

During his conversation on The Last Podcast on the Left, however, he [Ryan Coogler] was asked – half jokingly – about whether he had spoken to Gillian Anderson. He not only confirmed he had, but that he was “hopeful” something might come of it, which suggests a new series could well still feature the original characters in some capacity. This aligns with Anderson confirming to Today she had spoken with Coogler about the idea last year....

CONCLUSION

Gillian, like a phoenix, is apt to cyclical rebirth and redefinition.

Thanks for reading~

Enjoy!

#GA #Gillian Anderson #txf #but not #Piper Anderson #1993 #2025 #all the way through #learned a lot and wanted to share #catchin up on old news #mine #interviews #Gillian Anderson: a Retrospective Glance

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