Ex-it, agent Scully!
Gillian’s truth files
Ask Gillian Anderson a simple question and you get a simple answer. For example, why is she now leaving The XX-Files after a quarter of a century pla playing FBI agent Dana Scully?
“Because.” She leaves the single sin word hanging in the air. It is i a complete sentence, not the th beginning of one. She softens the th finality of it with a quirky lopsided lop smile. This is classic Gillian Gi – accountable to no-one, , enigmatic, slightly abrasive, captivating and very likeable.
Gillian turns 50 this year and has long said she wants to do other things. She’s been playing Scully on and off for half her life, even though The X-Files is not the sort of programme she watches.
“It’s not my cup of tea,” she tells us. “I tend towards documentaries.”
She’s an odd mixture of spiky and open. Gillian bristles when Woman’s Day uses the word “detached” to describe the characters she tends to play, yet the next moment, she is throwing out extraordinarily intimate details, telling us about her love affair with a woman who died of brain cancer.
Her appeal has more than stood the test of time. In 1996, Gillian was voted Sexiest Woman in the World by men’s magazine FHM and, 20 years later, in 2016, she was named one of the World’s Most Beautiful Beaut Faces by People. Early this year, her star was unveiled on the t Hollywood Walk of Fame.
It is hard to emphasise quite q how groundbreaking and a iconic the role of Scully was w back when The X-Files debuted d in 1993. “You have to remember that what was on TV was Baywatch,” says Gillian. “That “T sort of female character did di not exist before.”
We meet at Fox Studios in Los Lo Angeles, where the actress has ha just launched the 11th season sea of the TVNZ 2 sci-fi drama. dra With short, white-blonde hair, Gillian looks more like an ethereal Marilyn Monroe than the flame-haired Scully.
When she appears in the doorway of our meeting room, she is clutching a paper plate with a large wedge of white bread stuffed with rare beef and orange
cheese, which she later picks at, crumbs flying everywhere. “Sorry, I’ve got to eat,” she says. “I’m just getting a little light-headed.”
Patting the cushion next to her on the sofa, she says, “Come over here. Have a seat.” For someone with a reputation for frostiness, she is surprisingly warm.
End of an era
Fourteen years after the series originally ended in 2002, The X-Files returned in 2016 for a short 10th season. Ratings-wise, it was a success, although it was dismissed as somewhat limp by critics, which is why Gillian returned for one last season. “It wasn’t our finest moment,” she confides. “It felt like we could find a better way to end.”
Fortunately for her fans, there is still the possibility that she’ll reprise her role as steely inspector Stella Gibson in gritty series
The Fall. Of all the characters she’s played, she feels her own personality is most closely aligned to Stella’s. “Although she’s more serious. In my life, there’s a lot more silliness.”
Scully, on the other hand, is “very passionate and multilayered and goofy and vulnerable”, but “she feels very square to me”. It’s the passion between her and Fox Mulder that is most interesting to viewers.
“There’s something quite
unique about the connection that David [Duchovny] and I have on screen,” says Gillian. “It’s more evident to me now than it ever was just how important our dynamic is for the series.”
Off the show, however, their relationship is purely professional. “We get along very well, but in our daily communication, there’s no intimacy. We don’t see each other. Our kids have never met each other.”
Since 2016, Gillian has been in a relationship with Peter Morgan, the creator of The
Crown. Previously, she was married to Clyde Klotz, an
X-Files assistant art director and the father of her daughter, Piper, now 23. They divorced in 1997, with Gillian saying he bored her.
Later, she married Julian Ozanne, a documentary filmmaker, but they divorced ced in 2006. She has not married ed since, although she had a long relationship with businessman Mark Griffiths, hs, the father of her sons Oscar, 11, and Felix, nine. They parted in 2012.
It’s been a few years since she first mentioned, almost casually, that she has had relationships with h women. “It’s just who I am,” m,” Gillian says. “I have no issue ue with it whatsoever and I don’t on’t really care if other people have an issue with it.
“The reason I initially came out is because one of f the women that I had been with had just died of a brain tumour. I spoke about it in a way to honour the fact that it existed and to honour her existence in my life.”
Were they together when she died? “No. This was way back when I’d just j graduated g from f college. ll It was a really ll important thing for me.”
Born to American parents but having spent much of her childhood in London, Gillian says, “I’ve always felt like an outsider.” At high school in the US, she was voted “most “m bizarre girl” and an “most likely to be arrested”. arre And she was indeed indee arrested – for breaking breakin into her school on graduation gradu night to glue the locks of the doors. When h she started out as an actress, Gillian had no intention of doing television. “What I wanted to do were BBC dramas and Merchant Ivory films,” she confesses. “But as they say, the way to make God laugh is to tell t him your plans.” In other words, she found herself h sucked into TV when she auditioned for The X X-Files. Would she have signed s if she knew how long the t role would last? After a very v long pause, Gillian says, “It’s “tricky. When I signed up, all a I knew was that I could pay p the rent. There’s part of o me that would say, ‘Of course, c it’s an extraordinary character c and I’m extraordinarily o lucky.’” But there is also a part that th feels she signed away the th best part of her life. “We shot s 24 episodes over nine and a half months every year, over and over again.”
These days, she wants to spend time at home with her sons before they become teenagers. “I want to catch them before that turn happens and they don’t want to have anything to do with me.”
An outspoken feminist and supporter of the Time’s Up movement, Gillian was furious when she discovered she was offered half of what David was being paid for the 10th season of The X-Files.
“I said, ‘You either pay me the same or I’m not doing it,’ which means they don’t have a show.”
When asked where she sees her career in 20 years, she insists she doesn’t really think ahead. On a personal level, she’s even vaguer. “I could be in a relationship with a woman next year.”
For the moment, Gillian is very happy with Peter, but she makes no assumptions about the future.
“It’s important that it’s a daily choice,” she says of her relationship. “Part of me looks long-term, as long as there’s always a back door.”