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Risky business
The Fall and rise of Gillian Anderson
One night in the summer of 2014, during the Young Vic’s sell-out r un of A Streetcar
Named Desire, Gillian Anderson, playing Bla nche DuBois wit h a rapt ure t hat seemed to almost deify the role, took to t he stage for t he customary standing ovation with blood coursing down one leg. Her knee had been hit by a splinter of china from a plate hurled by a furious Stanley Kowalski (Ben Foster), and the wound had split open when she dropped to the foor.
‘Never have I seen a production of the play that was so raw in its emotion, so violent and so deeply upsetting,’ said the
Telegraph critic Charles Spencer. I was in the audience that night, on my feet and cheering what was an incandescent performance. Now, two years later, Anderson shows me the scar on her leg. It had been bandaged up backstage and she thought it would be fne. The next morning, she lifted the bandage to take a look, and ‘I lost consciousness. I went so far away. And when I woke up there were four people standing over me. I’m a bit phobic about blood. There’s been quite a bit of blood in my life with my kids over the years, and I would rather be the one who’s strong rather than the mother who turns away or passes out…’
She passed out several times. It was down to exhaustion too – ‘By this point my whole being felt drained. I felt like I was the thinnest of threads’ – and there were two shows the next day. The doctor told her the cut was exceptionally deep and she’d be of for two weeks. In the end the show was cancelled for just one night (which was a shame, she says, as Tom
Stoppard had tickets), and she choreographed a strategy that was knee-friendly on stage.
Today she has just returned from a hugely successful r un of the play in New York, at St Ann’s Warehouse in Brooklyn, and is completely elated. ‘The whole experience for the cast and crew was kind of miraculous,’ she says. ‘Most often there’s something that doesn’t quite work – but ever y t hing, ever y single thing, ft into place like cogs that were meant to work together.’
Anderson is perched on a sofa in the bar of a small London hotel, wearing a blue dress, with her legs and bare feet tucked underneath her. Her face is pale and completely beautiful. She has an air of fragility but also a voluptuousness of spirit; there is something wayward about her, and a sense of mystery and great depth. What you see is not necessarily what you get, and what you get is certainly not all there is.
But she takes all my questions head-on, and is articulate and thoughtful in her replies.
We talk more about the blood. When she was little, she says, her father sliced his fnger open on a tuna can, went into the bathroom to rinse it, and passed out on the foor, falling against the door so nobody could open it to get to him. ‘So perhaps the phobia is hereditary.’
None of this bodes well for the third series of The Fall, the BBC’s riveting drama about a ser ia l killer in Belfast being hunted by Anderson’s DSI Stella Gibson. In t he f irst episode of the new series, Paul Spector (Jamie Dornan) – who was shot at the end of the last one – is in the operating theatre having abdominal surgery to save his life. And boy, is there blood – a lot of it. There is a wonderful scene in which the camera draws back on the chaotic aftermath in the trauma room, revealing all t he visceral det r itus and discarded shoes and bits of clothing – it’s like a still life by Sam Peckinpah.
Anderson, as the inscrutable Gibson, cont inues her bat t le of wit s wit h Spector, t hough she is now under investigation for allowing him to be shot while in police custody. There are moments of great tenderness in this episode; but I can also reveal that Spector’s nurse in hospital is young and pretty with black hair, rather like his favourite type of strangulation date…
The Fall was created by Allan Cubitt, who wrote the part of Stella Gibson with Anderson in mind. Gibson is perfect territory for Gillian Anderson: enig matic and acerbic, endlessly sex y, but wit h a cer tain moral ambig uit y. Anderson has described her as an island, and had no trouble getting under her skin.
‘I like Stella a lot,’ she says. ‘I really like her. I felt I understood her without being told anything. Allan is such a good writer. There was something inherent in the sparseness of his writing, and how you learn about the characters t hrough t heir act ions. It’s rare to read a script that is so spare and yet gives you so much. All the characters are distinctive and interesting, and it felt quite European.’
The Fall was received rapturously by audiences and critics, but it had its controversial aspects, especially in initial episodes, which included rat her too many lov ing shots of Spector washing and posing corpses. Both Cubitt and Anderson vigorously defend the series against any accusations that it glamourises violence.
‘It’s an exploration of violence, but specifcally male violence against women,’ says Cubitt later, over the phone. ‘But the show always aimed to empower the female characters as much as possible, and that includes the victims – I did everything I could to build Sarah Kay’s character before she became a victim, and to sustain her character through the grief of her family and through Gibson’s insistence that the women don’t become faceless victims.’
‘Allan’s intention has never been in any way
‘In The Fall there’s birth, there’s death, there’s love, there’s sickness. He gets the audience to question their own ethics’
to exploit, or be explicit in how women are represented,’ Anderson says. ‘He’s not condoning it, it’s grounded in reality. Allan has done so much research on serial killers and their psycholog y. We are paying attention to the deep, deep tragedy of violence against women. There’s birth, there’s death, there’s love, there’s sickness. He gets the audience to question their own ethics.’
In one episode of the second series, Gibson draws attent ion to t he viewer’s complicity when she points out that it is the ‘people who like to read and watch prog rammes about people like Spector who should be asking themselves questions’. Anderson is an executive producer of The
Fall, so she collaborates with Cubitt (who directed the new series and the second). ‘I give notes on the edit, and I’ve been on set for so many years and have an intuition about scenes and shots and rhythm and whatever, so feel confdent about making suggestions. There are a few things I’ve fought for, but he might say, “No – I like it the way it is.” On a rare occasion I will say, begging, “Please look at it again.”’
‘Gillian is par ticular and meticulous. She understands what a shot is going to look like according to what lens you’ve got on the camera and so on,’ Cubitt says, ‘and she brings all of that to bear as well as being an intuitive and emotionally powerful actor. No one could render the character better.’
Detective Superintendent Stella Gibson is a complex woman. Cubitt rebelled against the archetypal TV detective with a dysfunctional trait: ‘They gamble or they drink or they have a failing marriage or a difcult daughter. I wanted to create a character who didn’t bring any obvious baggage into the story at the beginning, someone who you’d get to know little by little. I felt this refected the way things work in life: you meet people in a professional context and gradually, through the choices they make, you start to form an opinion of them. It’s not all laid out for you on a plate; you don’t immediately know about people’s childhood or their inner life, and so the idea was that she would be a fairly enigmatic character, and reveal herself gradually to the audience.
‘Gillian has always really embraced t hat aspect of Gibson. In fact, early on in the frst season, if there was anything I was doing that revealed too much about [the character] she’d encourage me to take it out, so there’s still a lot left to learn.’
The ambiguities of The Fall’s characters are one of the appealing things about the series. They are fallible in a credible way; not all good or all bad. The sadistic Spector, for example, while fond of torturing and strangling women, is very loving to his young daughter, Olivia; and Gibson herself makes some mistakes. ‘Yes, some decisions that Stella makes are very questionable – and I like that. I’ll think, “You just lied!”’ gasps Anderson. ‘How does that square with the rest of how you carry yourself ? That is so interesting…’
Do you recognise that quality in yourself, a certain recklessness?
She thinks for a moment. ‘Yeah. I am a mix of normal, safe, quiet, reg imented, serious, morally and ethically led – or at least I try to be for the most part. Then every once in a while – or maybe more than once in a while – there is a part of me that is incredibly reckless. I think it bubbles underneath all the time, but as a mother, and an earner, and a responsible working woman, I override many things that might be irresponsible. Most of the time.’
I am intrig ued: you still have the reckless instincts you had when you were younger, but you choose to go the other way? ‘Yes. Maybe yes.’ Were you wild when you were younger? ‘Mmmm…’ she says, nodding. And she was. Drugs – lots of them – and alcohol, along with stylistic misdemeanours such as piercings and adventurous hairstyles – followed by therapy when she was only 14.
Anderson was born in Chicago but moved to London when she was two. ‘We started in Clapham Common, sleeping in other people’s places for a while, sharing fats, then found a place in Crouch End, then Harringay.’ Her mother was a computer programmer and her father went to the London School of Film Technique, in Covent Garden, and opened a little shop selling old-fashioned cameras, with a friend who was a puppeteer. Then the family moved to Grand Rapids, Michigan, where her father ran a flm post-production company.
Anderson was the eldest ( by 13 years) of three children. In 1986 she won a place at DePaul University’s theatre school in Chicago. ‘I drove to Chicago in my dad’s VW bus, breaking down along the way, and lived in a very cheap pa r t of town,’ she says. When she graduated, she went to New York to audition for casting directors and agents. ‘I wrote my monolog ue and borrowed some clothes for my audit ion, t hen someone f rom William Morris said they would represent me if I moved to New York. So of I went, and lived on couches and auditioned for what felt like forever not getting anything.’ Her big break was a role in Alan Ayckbourn’s
Absent Friends, for which she won a best newcomer award, in 1991. She went to visit a boyfriend in LA, decided to stay and sold her return ticket. Then she landed The X-Files. She was 25.
In Vancouver, where she had fown to flm the pilot, she met her frst husband, Clyde Klotz, who was assistant art director on the series. Her daughter Piper was born the following year (an alien-abduction scene was arranged to cover for her pregnancy). Anderson played Dana Scully, an FBI agent and medical doctor assigned to investigate the X-Files, a collection of unsolved c a ses possibly ex pla i ned by supernatural phenomena. Scully is the hardline sceptic, the foil to Fox ‘Spooky’ Mulder (David Duchovny), whose frm belief in the paranormal stems from witnessing his sister’s abduction when he was a child.
Anderson clearly had little idea t hat The
‘If there are things that I want to do, I’m a bit like a dog with a bone. I leap before I look, but it also makes me say yes to things when I’m terrifed’
X-Files would last for 10 series and become one of the most successful sci-f series in television histor y – involving months of 16-hour days and many fghts with Duchovny. (The 10th season aired earlier this year, 14 years after the previous one.)
The X-Files was a life-changer, but Anderson was a troubled spirit. ‘Success has nothing to do with happiness,’ she frmly told a rattledsounding Sue Lawley on Desert Island Discs in 2003, when Lawley implied that being in The
X-Files should have brought her happiness. ‘That kind of security isn’t really security. It’s got nothing to do with material things.’
Since then, Anderson has had a prolifc career in telev ision, f ilm and t heat re and carved out a fairly unique position for herself; she is a cool customer whose portrayal of Scully inspired a whole generation of women, but she also appeals to purists and serious drama fans. She is memorable in
‘I am an actor, and there is vanity in me. There have been times when I’ve observed myself ageing and mourned my youth, and I am always shocked by that’
so many things: as the heartbreaking Lily Bart in The House of Mirth, as the undone Miss Havisham in the BBC’s Great Expectations, a nd as Lady Dedlock in a not her br illia nt BBC adaptation, Bleak House (a performance for which New York magazine memorably descr ibed her as ‘like a Ming vase wit h a Munch scream’).
She has won a multitude of awards, including a Golden Globe for The X-Files, and been nominated by FHM as the Sexiest Woman in the World (‘Meaningless’).
Not bad for a rebellious punk rocker who was voted the student most likely to get arrested by her schoolmates. She must be hugely motivated, I suggest, to have come as far as she has. ‘I don’t believe I’m ambitious,’ she says. ‘I don’t. I do have determination, and if there are things that I want to do, I’m a bit like a dog with a bone. And that has served me well in many ways. I leap before I look, but it also makes me say yes to things when I’m terrifed.
‘Take Streetcar, for example. I don’t know what it was, but something in me felt like it was something that I had to do before I died. So I was determined to make that happen.’ She didn’t really understand the character she was playing until halfway through rehearsals, she says. Her mother reminded her that she’d played the part of DuBois in a national competition, in which she’d come second. ‘I had done it when I was 16, and the crazy thing is I was 46 when I next played the part!’
At the end of the New York run, she was hear tbroken to leave DuBois behind. ‘The missing of it,’ she says emotionally. ‘I felt like somebody had died. She was like one of my oldest friends and I started to think, “If I don’t get to play her again then it’s like burying her.” I’ve never felt like that before about a role.’
She was old to play DuBois, but she brought to bear a convoluted mixture of g randeur and unravelling t ragedy. Anderson herself is no stranger to sadness. Her brother, Aaron, died of a brain tumour in 2011, having suffered from neurofbromatosis, a genetic disorder that causes tumours to g row on ner ve tissue, since he was three years old (Anderson works to raise awareness of the condition). She has been through two divorces, and in 2012 split with businessman Mark Grifths, the father of her two sons, Oscar, nine, and Felix, seven.
Anderson has lived in London with her children since 2002, having moved here from LA. (She st ill switches seamlessly f rom an American accent to an English one in interviews, depending on the continent.) Given her own adolescence, what kind of parent is she? ‘It’s interesting: on the one hand I feel as if I’ve gotten of easy with my daughter and how sane she is at 21, but then ever y now and then I think, “Oh, it just hasn’t come yet” – and if it does then I question how equipped I would be. I think I’m incredibly tr usting and lenient because of my own experiences, and I don’t watch over her, I don’t check things – I’ve never been that kind of mother. I love her with an open hand.’
Gillian Anderson is now 48, and looks better than ever. ‘The fact that I’m working consistently is miraculous, g iven t he histor y of our industr y. Especially over the past decade or so, television has been much more generous to women of a certain age, and there are many series led by women. It’s not quite the same in flm, but it is a conversation that was started some time ago and has picked up pace with what Meryl Streep is doing for equal pay. I hope that momentum will actually equate to changes. But you have to create more material to begin with.’
It must help that Anderson doesn’t look her age; and she is refreshingly un-self-deprecating about that. ‘It is my grandma Rose I have to thank – my mum says she is responsible for my skin. And when I was a teenager I looked older: I could always get into bars when I was underage, so I have been very lucky.’ Good genes, she thinks, are more efective than surgery. ‘There are so many things you can do these days without going under the knife: natural solutions. I’m not necessarily anti-surgery; I’m anti the shame that is attached to women who make that choice, rightly or wrongly, in their own mind. I think it’s unfortunate that there is so much pressure on women, and yet they are damned if they do and damned if they don’t. That is heinous.
‘But I must say very honestly that I am lucky. In a few years there may be something I fnd intolerable, and I’m not going to say I wouldn’t buckle. I hope that I would be comfortable enough with myself not to, but I have to allow for the fact that I am an actor, and there is vanity in me. There have been times when I’ve observed myself ageing and mourned my youth, and I am always shocked by that.
‘I guess all one can do is try to make sure that the motivation for those types of choices is coming from the right place.’
Anderson is honest about all this, but her feminist credentials and belief in t he par t women can play on the political stage are at the core of her being. She is co-writing a book called We: A Manifesto for Modern Women with journalist Jennifer Nadel. ‘It’s a set of guiding principles.’ And she recently took part in MP Jo Cox’s memorial ser vice in London. She didn’t know Cox, but ‘I was asked if I would read a poem, and I liked the poem and it felt like the right thing to do. It was a beautiful event; Malala [Yousafzai] was there, which almost brought me to tears. I was so moved and inspired by what she said. She’s something to be reckoned with.’
She is optimistic about Yousafzai’s generation. ‘There’s a lot of powerful thinkers and activists and doers out there, who feel like they’ve got something to say and are not going to sit back and be dictated to – it’s fantastic.’
And she is unfinching in her suppor t of Hillar y Clinton. ‘I think it’s so important to have a woman in the White House – and when will t hat happen again? ’ she says levelly. ‘Having women in power right now is vital to the stability and sanity of our globe.’