‘I get into trouble’: Gillian Anderson on being brave, her resting face and much anticipated book of sexual fantasies
“Ihave a tendency to be cast as those types of women who have unbelievable brains,” says Gillian Anderson, running her hands through her glamour of blonde hair, “because my resting face is intellectual, as if I’m thinking about Proust or the world order. When in fact it’s usually, actually, dinner.” The next unbelievably brained woman Anderson will play is British journalist Emily Maitlis, in Scoop, a film about the process of securing her 2019 Newsnight interview with Prince Andrew. This was the interview in which he discussed his friendship with sexual predator Jeffrey Epstein, his inability to sweat, and the Woking branch of Pizza Express, and, in 50 fast minutes, managed to do more damage to the royal family than five seasons of The Crown.
This will not be the first time Anderson has played a “real person” on screen. After growing up in London and moving to Michigan at 11, she found community in the punk scene as a teenager, before lurching into wild fame in her 20s as Agent Scully in The X-Files, later being cast as Wallis Simpson, Eleanor Roosevelt and, memorably, Margaret Thatcher. Now 55, with three children, she is both curious about and resigned to her status as “world’s sexiest woman”. When Emily Maitlis heard Anderson was to play her, she told GQ: “I have teenage sons, so that was hormonally complicated.”
There has been a low hum of distrust online about the way that Newsnight interview has so quickly become, somehow, an entertainment franchise. This Netflix film (in which Rufus Sewell plays Andrew) will be followed by another, separate series (in which Ruth Wilson will play Maitlis), and in 2022 there was a comedy musical about the interview that rhymed “pizza Fiorentina” with “friend soliciting a minor”. One criticism has been that we are memorialising a moment before it has been processed. But I was relieved upon watching Scoop that it is dark, and suitably thrilling. “I had the same reaction!” says Anderson. “It’s properly interesting and surprising, isn’t it?”
It sort of goes without saying by now – all of us having enjoyed Anderson for many decades as an actor who brings an elegant mischief to her intellectual women – that she is exquisite in this role. But here she appears somehow to be even more Maitlis than Maitlis herself – a meta-Maitlis maybe, describing with her mannerisms and demure ferocity a glittering kind of feminine power, and elevating the story so it becomes less about Prince Andrew and more about the collaborative efforts of a group of women who, as Anderson says, “hold power to account”.
They filmed the interview first, with minimal rehearsal. “Sitting opposite Gillian as Emily Maitlis was an extraordinary feeling,” Rufus Sewell tells me. “Her relentless, laser-like focus, and uncanny vocal and physical resemblance to the woman I’d been studying alongside Andrew all this time made it suddenly quite easy to squirm.” He’s worked with Gillian before: “I’ve always been a fan of hers and the palpable sense of will that she brings to a character. It’s a formidable thing to be up against and I relish it. She made it very hard for Andrew and somehow easier for me.”
Because Maitlis is involved in the competing series she declined to meet Anderson, so it was a shock when the two accidentally came face to face recently at a charity event. “I had literally driven in from the country, having spent a week in mud with kids on the side of some hill. I didn’t have any makeup with me, didn’t even have a brush to go through my hair. And then, all of a sudden, there’s Emily Maitlis, and she looks like a movie star.” Anderson hoots. Because she had been studying her for months, she (the actual movie star) went in for a hug. Which sounds, perhaps, like it was a mistake. “She was very sweet, but very boundaried. Very boundaried,” Anderson recalls.
In the research, Anderson started to notice similarities between her and Maitlis’s work. Specifically, she remembered trying to cry during an emotional scene in her 2000 film The House of Mirth, but they were shooting in a flight path, “and there was a fucking bumblebee in our faces!” There are so many “human scenarios” like this, Anderson says, when things don’t go to plan on a job, and in those moments “all the facts fly out of my head. But with the Emilys of the world, it incentivises and invigorates them – somehow the facts remain, and they have a sharper access to them because of the frisson that’s created in the moment.” She briefly marvels. “I identify with the pressure and expectation,” says Anderson, but, crucially, she always relies on a script. “How impressive, how daunting, the idea of being able to just go with whatever happens in front of you,” she says, in her liquid accent that slips from London to America within a single sentence. Did the character stay with her? “That feels a bit creepy, like taking ownership of something that is not mine. And also, you know, she’s had experience with stalkers – she doesn’t need another example of that from me.”
The only character, in fact, that has lingered in Anderson long after the work ended was Blanche DuBois. “With all the characters I’ve played, even Scully, who I played for the longest, it feels like there’s a sheath between me and them, whereas I feel like Blanche could come back in a split second.” This was the Young Vic’s 2014 production of A Streetcar Named Desire, when Anderson said she immersed herself so deeply she was hanging on to reality by a thread. Talking to the director after one show she had a vision of a train. “It’s not in heaven, but somewhere in another dimension, a train that has continuous cars that’s just going and going ad infinitum. And everybody who’s ever done a Tennessee Williams play is on that train. And once you do it, a part of you can never get off.”
She giggles a little nervously. “I’m getting very esoteric here but I do wonder, you know, when people talk about ‘the muse’ or connecting to something that is bigger than themselves, by immersing oneself into a Rothko or Brice Marden or a Tennessee Williams you somehow enter into this realm of understanding. There’s no coming back – it felt dangerous.” Your job sounds, I offer sensitively, a bit bonkers. “It’s totally bonkers! I thought about this recently, going to the Baftas and the Golden Globes” – to which, we should note, Anderson wore a dress embroidered all over with vulvas – “all of these artists who have put everything into the work: blood, sweat, tears, money. Put their families second to this singular vision and then… it doesn’t get nominated. I wish there was an award for effort. For even, actually, getting the thing made at all! Bonkers.”
She’s remembering The House of Mirth again, when “one particularly horrendous review about my performance almost made me quit acting. The mixture of that and the bland reception was a real eye opener for me, a rude awakening to the fickleness of the industry.” She pauses. “I don’t know what it is about you, but we always go so deep,” she says, so we talk instead, cheerily, about soft drinks.
Last year, after trying to wean herself off Coca-Cola, Anderson launched a “functional drink” called G Spot, and as well as learning about “adaptogens” and “nootropics”, she was surprised to learn about herself. What she learned was, she says with some majesty, “I too am ‘product’.” When colleagues started referring to “Brand Gillian”, taking into account not just the drink, pitched smartly as a kind of anti-wellness wellness product, but her new production company, too, she felt deeply uncomfortable. “At first I kept saying, can we not frame it differently, please? And then I started to realise, actually, that it makes sense to… embrace it.” She explains: “I’ve been in the industry 30 years, and have a significant fanbase that has become obsessed with various characters that I have played, whether that’s Scully or Stella [in The Fall], or Blanche, or Jean [in Sex Education]. There’s something that women are getting from them, and the alchemy of me being attached.”
For a while after The Fall, in which she played a ruthless, urbane cop, she heard about bumper stickers that said, “What would Stella do?” “That’s a form of empowerment, whether in imagining oneself as Stella in order to ask for the raise, or investigating oneself as an individual: what you want, what you want to put in your body, what you want out of your life, what you want from your job, what you want from your partner, what you want in bed… And feeling courageous enough to ask for it, too.”
She grins. “Choose not to do what everybody else is doing. Choose not to go to the gym today. Choose to eat the chocolate bar!” The more Anderson talks, the more it seems as though embracing Brand Gillian has been surprisingly therapeutic and energising for her, as though identifying what appeals about her to others has clarified who she wants to be. “I’m not a guru. It’s just about encouraging anyone who identifies as a woman to courageously embrace that part of them that knows ultimately, intuitively, what’s good for them. And be brave enough to say yes, or brave enough to say no.”
Has she always been that brave herself? “It took me a long time to do it in romantic relationships, but I could do it pretty much everywhere else.” How? “It’s come from circumstances in my life. It’s come from where I grew up, how I grew up. Being peripatetic, being a TV star at 20, having a child at 25. It’s all of it.”
While her “side hustles” are under a spotlight, Anderson’s private life is just as demanding. Though she prefers not to confirm the name of her partner, tabloids suggest she’s back together with her partner of four years, Peter Morgan, the screenwriter best known for The Crown. Her daughter is 29, and her sons, she tells me proudly, are “professional sportsmen. I mean, the youngest is 15, so it’s hard to call him a man but that is their life and their focus. Which means my life and their dad’s life” – ex-husband Mark Griffiths – “is filled with facilitating that dream for them. It involves a lot of driving and us, you know, doing whatever they tell us to do, basically.” The juxtaposition between the two halves of her life, one glamorous, the other frazzled and suburban, is oddly thrilling. “It’s exhilarating and terrifying,” she says of supporting her sons. “It’s emotional, too, trying to let them have their own journey, but not trying to fix things. They work hard.” She smiles a new kind of smile. “And they put me to shame.”
It is a particularly interesting time to interview Anderson, as “Brand Gillian”, she adds, “Is all about trying to answer every question as honestly as possible”. That can be dangerous too, though, can’t it? Authenticity has a price. “Yes I’ll get into trouble,” she smiles, “from time to time.” She has had to be slightly cautious recently when writing introductions to the chapters of a book she’s editing. The book came about after Anderson put a call out for women to share, anonymously, their sexual fantasies. This has been a gorgeous kink in her career, the pivot to sex: it happened after the popularity of her role as charismatic therapist Jean Milburn in Sex Education, and it has led to Anderson taking ownership of her former status as sex object, and turning the gaze outward, with humour and depth. “If I weren’t in the public eye, as I am, I’d be able to be much more frank when writing about how the fantasies relate to my own experience. And there have been versions of intros that I’ve done where I’ve shut myself down because I could see that Daily Mail headline, you know?”
Amid the 174 fantasies in the book is hidden one of her own. “We’ve found a balance of what feels genuine and true without the whole book becoming about me. Yes, I have identification, and hopefully many women reading it will have identification, too. But it’s about women collectively. It’s an exploration of our internal worlds,” she says, with precision. Has she found the editing process titillating? “It’s become more titillating in the edit. Being able to have one thing flow into another and poetry to be revealed in the process, it has become exciting and titillating and surprising and moving and beautiful.”
And it’s taught her two things. “That even though this is a fearless exploration, there are so many things that are still untouchable subjects, or too risky for big companies or individuals to embrace without consequence.” The second thing it has taught her: “I need to focus my mind. What’s the message? What’s the moral? What are you left with at the end of the day? What do women want? And – do they have to stay in fantasy? There’s a lot of yearning, for what women don’t have, or feel afraid to ask for.” Has it, then, felt like a political project? “You know, everything is politics, particularly when you steer into the subject of women.” The book, she adds, is called Want.
I am curious where Brand Gillian goes next, in terms of business, and to see where this self-reflection takes her. “Yes, it feels like a valid and intriguing, sometimes exciting, creative journey to be on.” She admits, after a pause, “I didn’t expect it to be. I’ve been in therapy for a good portion of my life. And so I thought all of the questions had been asked, or that I was fixed. But this is a different way of looking at things.” Her eyes widen, theatrically. “And, I guess, I’m along for the ride.”
Scoop is on Netflix from 5 April
Fashion editors Jo jones and Hope Lawrie; hair by James Rowe at Bryant Artists using Bumble and Bumble; makeup Amanda Grossman at The Only Agency using Dr Strum and Suqqu; fashion assistant Sam Deaman; photography assistants Claudia Gschwend, Tom Frimley and Tilly Pearson
THE GUARDIAN
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