Gillian Anderson

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0:31Hello and welcome to This Cultural Life, the series in which leading artistic figures discuss the most important influences and experiences that have inspired their own creativity. I'm John Wilson and my guest in this episode is the actor Gillian Anderson. Her breakthrough television role in the sci-fi series The X-Files made her a global star in 1993, and she played the cool-headed agent Dana Scully for more than a decade. Since then, she starred in period dramas, including an acclaimed film adaptation of Edith Wharton's novel The House of Mirth, and on television in Bleak House, Great Expectations and War and Peace.

1:08Her theatre credits include A Doll's House, A Streetcar Named Desire and All About Eve, all of which saw her nominated for Olivier Awards. Gillian Anderson has won Golden Globe and Emmy Awards for The X-Files and also for The Crown, in which she played Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher. More recently, she found a new generation of fans for her role as a sex therapist in the series Sex Education. Her latest film is The Salt Path, adapted from the best-selling memoir by Raynaud Wynne.

1:40Gillian Anderson, welcome to This Cultural Life. Thank you for having me. We're here in the BBC Radio Drama Studio. You made a radio drama, 84 Charing Cross Road, for Radio 4, I think, in 2007. I was wondering whether that was done in here. I feel like we sat in a place that had stairs right behind me. Is there an upper...? There are stairs there. Yeah, yeah. You could have been on a balcony. Possibly, yeah. Oh, interesting. The Ellery Queen series raised me to$250 a script. If it keeps up till June, I may get to England and browse around my bookshop myself. In that drama, you played Helene Hamph, the protagonist, or the writer, of 84 Charing Cross Road.

2:26It's a memoir. Performing with an American accent, as we can hear today, you have very much a British accent, which reflects your transatlantic identity. Do you consciously switch between accents, depending on where you are? Oh, if I know the audience is going to be American, I will switch to American even if the interviewer is British. Most of the time it's because I'm in the UK and this is where I learned to speak with a British accent at age two or whatever. And if I'm not, then it's because I'm in America or if I'm on the phone to a relative or whatever, after a while I'll slip into the American.

3:06but it's usually not conscious. So childhood in London. You were born in Chicago, then moved to London at a young age. Early memories of growing up in Crouch End it was, wasn't it? Yeah, well, we didn't start in Crouch End. We started on people's sofas and communal living for a while and then we ended up, I think, I'm going to forget, but it was, yes, we ended up in Crouch End and very much remember the clock tower and my school was right up the road. and my nursery was around the corner. I remember Dunn's Bakery and Budgins and all of that, so it's still very much in my brain. What were your parents doing?

3:48What brought them here? So we were in Chicago, and I was about six months old, and my dad said to my mum that he wanted to go to study film, to go to film school. And would she prefer that they move to California or London? Oh. And she said London. Right. So he signed up for the London Film School and moved when I was two. Did you have early ambitions as a child to act, to perform? No, not at all. I think everyone was cast in a school musical that one of the teachers wrote. I played the third someone on the left kind of thing you know um I remember being up on the stage and I remember quite liking the attention but I do not think that that was the moment that I decided that that was what I wanted to do nor do I think that I particularly stood out or felt like I had any talent in it or that wasn't the childhood epiphany that wasn't that was not born to do no it really really wasn't no I think you were about 11 years old when you moved with your parents to Grand Rapids in Michigan.

4:59How was that leaving friends that I guess you had around you in Crouch End already and that sense of community? I had a couple of friends from school. They were quite lonely friendships and I didn't have a lot of friends and also because my parents were Yanks even though for all intents and purposes I appeared English, I was still not. I think that did impact friendships. I had one good friend, but it was up and down, the friendship. Were you regarded as British or a Londoner when you moved to Michigan, though? Yes. I mean, yes and no. I mean, I had a British accent when I moved to Michigan. It took a little while to rid myself of it.

5:47And I think back then, it was so easy for me to fall into it that I would pull it out at various points or if I was asked to read a passage from you know in high school from Shakespeare or whatever it would you know I'd take advantage of it. But you must have been seen as quite exotic though in Michigan having come from London in the 70s. Very exotic you know eventually I think that was probably why I was accepted at the high school that I went to because it was a purely academic high school they didn't really have sports they didn't have a theatre programme, and I wasn't particularly academic.

6:21So I think I sounded smarter than I was because of the accent. So I think I was learning that it was serving a useful purpose. You've said before that you were a rebellious teenager. What form did this rebellion take? Oh, God, everything. How did it manifest itself? You know, lots of attitude, shaved heads and nose piercings and mohawk sometimes when I would go out. You were a punk? Yeah, yeah. And, you know, my boyfriend at the time when I was young was considerably older than I was and he was in a punk band and our life was centred around that and that world, punk scene. How did your parents react to that?

7:08Oh, I think it terrified them. Yeah. I think it was hard for them. I think I felt misunderstood, as we all do when we were a young teen, but I also feel like they didn't understand. You know, I would stay out late and I'm sure I looked like I was on things and the people that I hung out with were dubious and I'm sure they were nervous. And older, yeah. A lot older, yeah. Was it joyful, rebellion, or were you an angry teen, do you think? Oh, I was an angry teen. So more than just being a teenager, for specific reasons. Are there aspects of that teenage version of yourself that you've carried on into adulthood and your professional life that you've almost channelled into your acting, do you think?

7:53Yeah, I mean, I think that I don't have a tendency to conform. I buckle a bit under certain types of structure or rules. I think there's a part of me that refuses to believe certain things or that certain things have to be the way they are and I think I push against them. So, yeah, I think it still shows up. Are you talking about a social mindset or a political mindset? Oh, both, yeah. I mean, just even in terms of some of the other things that I've gotten involved with, you know, using my voice and platform to be outspoken about various things, particularly women's issues and human rights issues.

8:41On This Cultural Life, Gillian Anderson, my guests choose the most important creative influences and experiences. And your first choice for this programme is Rick Murphy, who is your theatre professor at DePaul University in Chicago. So before we talk about him, just give us a sense of when you really first became interested in theatre, when acting became an ambition. When I was 16 in high school in Michigan, I was cast in my first proper community play. It was And the Nightingale Sang and got to play British. That's the first time I was properly on a stage in front of an audience and something clicked inside.

9:24And I think from that point on, I was determined that was what I wanted to do. and so had auditioned for the Paul Theatre Conservatory. It was a four-year programme in Chicago. I didn't send any applications in anywhere else. I was pretty determined that that's where I was going to go and Rick Murphy was a teacher there. He was the head of the drama department, if I'm remembering correctly. He was a really special teacher. He was hard to please. He was very cool. He was short and balding and dashing and mischievous and everybody wanted to impress him. And he just, he had a way with talking about the craft of acting that physicalised it.

10:21He taught us about Meisner and we studied viola spolin and he would come up with these games that we would play. And to please him in the class was everything, right? Was he a hard taskmaster? No, not at all. But he was careful with his attention. If you showed that you wanted his attention, he wouldn't give it. You know what I mean? He was very... I mean, I think he knew the power that he had. Right. and when I first met him it was in the first couple days while I was settling into the school before we'd started classes. I was with a friend and we bumped into him on the street or I saw him on the street and I, you know, I went up to him and I said, you're amazing and I'm going to be in your class and he was quite cold.

11:12He kind of shrugged it off and, you know, and as we were walking away all of a sudden he came up to us and he said are you the girl who did suddenly last summer for your audition and I said yes and he said something very nice you're wonderful you're amazing I was like whatever he was that he said so he'd already spotted you he'd already spotted me at the audition yeah and but I carried that right so that I mean that was an extraordinary I mean I still get goosebumps when I think about it that was an extraordinary moment for me because I you know part of me idealized him and and so I felt that he believed in me and he continued to to show that he believed in me through those four years.

11:54What is his legacy on the professional work you've done in the years since do you think? Have you taken aspects of his advice? Oh I think so I mean so he would play particular theatre games obviously improv we would push ourselves and it was immersing ourselves so specifically in the time and the place of that character that we were only in the moment of picking up the cut but we were picking up the cut because we were so absorbed we were picking up the cut entirely with the information of who that character was and taking that from beat to beat to beat to beat and I remember when I've experienced it in its full form and benefit and joy of being able to do that was actually when I was doing Streetcon M Desire.

12:43And one can really expand in that space, in that presence, in a way that is almost the epitome of what the joy of theatre is. If you weren't my wife's sister, I'd get ideas about you. Such as what? Don't play so dumb. You know what? Where the papers? What papers? Papers that stuff people write on. Oh, papers, papers, the first anniversary gift. All kinds of papers. I'm talking legal papers connected with a plantation. Oh, there were some papers. You mean they're no longer existing? Well, they probably are somewhere. But not in a trunk? Everything that I own is in that trunk. If you are fully in the moment, you are totally responding in the moment to everything that's happening.

13:25And when you're doing theatre, that can change night after night. It's just completely different and how the audience responds and how they're breathing and how they're receiving what it is that you're doing and giving can impact, you know. And so it's almost like a meditation in a way, but it's a living, breathing, active thing. Your performance as Blanche Dubois in Streetcar Named Desire was an incredibly intense performance. Do you feel he was very much steering that performance? I mean, is that his legacy? Yeah. I think there's still part of me that's still trying to impress him. Are you still in touch with him?

14:04We were for a while. What did he make of your career? I mean, he's, you know, he's proud. And impressed, I guess. Yeah. After university, you moved to New York at the age of 22 and you had a series of theatre roles. You were in Absent Friends, I think, by Alan Akebourne. Yes. and also the philanthropist Christopher Hampton's play. Yeah, all these British plays. So the aim was theatre then. When you set out, you just imagine that's what the career would be, a stage career primarily. I knew when I was in theatre school that I also wanted to do film and telly, mostly film. At that time, and I know it's completely changed now, but there wasn't really lessons in that.

14:49I think there might have been a day or half a day or something that we spent on something to do with auditions for film or something at the end of my college years. But in my head, that was always a part of it. So when I was in New York auditioning for theatre, I was starting to audition also for film and television. And it was around this time that you moved to Los Angeles and you auditioned for the role of Agent Scully, the cool-headed, rational investigator of the paranormal and extraterrestrial activity in the television sci-fi series, The X-Files. Agent Mulder, I'm Dana Scully. I've been assigned to work with you.

15:30Oh, isn't it nice to be suddenly so highly regarded? So who did you take off to get stuck with this detail, Scully? Actually, I'm looking forward to working with you. I've heard a lot about you. Oh, really? I was under the impression that you were sent to spy on me. How did you prepare for that role? How did you prepare for the audition? I remember where I was when I read the script, the pilot script. I really didn't want to do telly, but there was something special about it. It was certainly different than anything that I had or any feature script that I had read so far. I mean, I was only there for a year before I was cast in it, so it was very quick.

16:13You were in Los Angeles. Yeah. It's funny because I feel that I had in my head who she was from the very beginning. And it was certainly on the page. But it was really the first time that I was exploring becoming something else for the screen. And I'd never inhabited anything like that before. I'd never inhabited a character like that. The girl obviously died of something. If it was natural causes, it's plausible that there was something missed in the postmortem. If she was murdered, it's plausible there was a sloppy investigation. What I find fantastic is any notion that there are answers beyond the realm of science.

16:55The answers are there. You just have to know where to look. That's why they put the I in FBI. I'm sure that on some level I must have had Jodie Foster in my mind a little bit because of Silence of the Lambs. And there was a squareness about Scully that is true of Clarice Starling. Squareness? You mean she's not cool? Yeah, or just... There's another element of squareness which is bookish, intelligent. Is it the rationality? It's the fact that she's quite serious? Yeah, and would probably choose to do sensible things as opposed to things that might get her into trouble. You know, she's sensible, right?

17:42And I don't think I've ever been sensible in my life before that point. So it felt quite foreign to me. And so it felt quite brave, I guess, the audition. And also when you're doing those auditions, you first start and you audition for the casting director and they put you on tape. And the casting director shows it to the director and the producer. And if they want to bring you in, then you go in and you audition in front of them. And then if you go to network, you're going to the studios and all the actors who are auditioning for Mulder and all the actresses auditioning for Scully are all in the same area in the hallways of Fox Network.

18:23That's brutal. Brutal. and then you go into one room that is a quarter the size of this room where all the studio heads are, all the execs, all the Fox people, everything who are deciding, sitting in their chair like this, you know, two inches from you, and you're doing auditions in front of them and then you do your best and you're with this actor and then you get sent out in the hallway and you're sitting there amongst everybody else and you see somebody else go in, you might hear laughter or, you know, somebody's face as they come out, they might be, like, thinking, oh, that was awful or they might, you know, be pretending that it went really well because, you know, it's just that.

19:01Did it feel like it went well in the moment? Did you walk out of that room thinking, yeah, I nailed that? I think I was pretty confident. I think I was pretty confident that I was her. I wasn't confident after... I mean, they didn't bring me back right away. They were still auditioning for people, So they said something in them didn't think that I was right. And then when they did bring me back in a week later, they had brought in all these actresses from New York that I had known from theatre. And it was, you know, it was Cynthia Nixon who then was in Sex and the City. It was Jill Hennessy who was in L.A.

19:40Law. So they wanted a serious actress. But I'd never done anything before. You know, I'd done nothing. I'd hardly done anything. And all these, you know, all these actresses had done quite a lot of stuff. So anyway, it was, yeah, it was it was daunting. And but by the same token, because there weren't stakes. I mean, other than the fact that when I got the job, I had just received my last unemployment check. I didn't see those as stakes. I didn't even understand what what television was. I didn't understand that things were reruns. I don't even think that I knew at that juncture that when I was watching the Brady Bunch when I was in high school, that that actually was something.

20:22Had been made years before. I mean, I think I understood that to a degree, but I didn't know about that reruns would come on when the network wasn't shooting. You know, I didn't know any of that. I didn't know when they said pick up for 13. You know, I knew nothing. I was so naive that, you know, if I got it, I got it. If I didn't get it, I didn't get it. Which means you had no idea what was going to happen in the following years because, of course, it became one of the biggest shows on television. You became very, very famous, having been unemployed a few weeks earlier. And it ran for nine consecutive seasons from 1993.

20:58Did it feel during that time at all that The X-Files and the character that you became, that that somehow restricted your career as an actor? It certainly did when I was filming. You know, one of the first things that I did, we had such short hiatuses and I had a small child by the time we were in our second season even. And so, you know, doing anything at all during that period of time was madness. And yet I was approached by Terence Davies to do The House of Mirth. and I had been such a huge fan of his and the opportunity was so great that I said yes to that. Her photograph came into the office and I looked at her and I said, that's a single sergeant face.

21:50Can I see her? Well, she's in the X-Files, they said. I said, well, as I don't watch the X-Files, I have no idea, you know, what that means. So she happened to be in town. I sent her the script. She liked it. We read four or five scenes. I said, will you do it? she said yes. Lily Bard is the tragic heroine of The House of Mirth, adapted by Terence Davis from the novel by Edith Ward. Heartbreaking story in many ways. So did you know the novel? I did not know the novel at all. I knew his work, but I knew that I wanted my career to have that scope. And I knew that it was important to show myself and other people that I could do something other than Scully.

22:34My genius would appear to be my ability to do the wrong thing at the right time. Or vice versa. Is there any final test of genius but success? I certainly haven't succeeded. But you will marry someone very rich. What a miserable future you foresee for me. Haven't you seen it for yourself? Of course. But it seems so much darker when you show it to me. And just tell me something about Terence Davis, who you say you're a fan of his work, Distant Voices, Still Lives, I presume. Yes, and The Long Day Closes. I mean, he was an extraordinary indie director and I had seen a couple of his films and had, you know, sat weeping in the movie theatre because of a shot that he had.

23:24I mean, his films are very autobiographical and can be quite stark and dark and tragic, but also his use of light and texture and also how he frames, where he puts the camera, all of that. I just thought he was a genius. And I remember specifically there's a very, very long shot, I think in the long day closes of a reflection of a window pane on a rug that holds for I don't know how many minutes but it was I just started weeping and I thought that says everything that's that's the only place the camera could be in this moment after the scene that we've just left and it just he felt like such an artist to me and so him asking me to do that I there was no way under the sun I wasn't going to do it, even if it meant that I was working during the only time off that I had.

24:24At the very end of the film, I said, play the entire end of the film stoically. If you play it stoically, it'll be heartbreaking. If you play it sentimentally, it'll be embarrassing. And when she actually dies through this accidental overdose, the only direction I gave her was I said, you know, just think of what Keats says, to cease upon the midnight with no pain. And when she does take the claw out at the end, I wanted her to drop the bottle. But I didn't tell her that. And the first take, no chloral came out of the bottle. Second take, the chloral dripped and then poured, then dripped again, then stopped.

25:00And she dropped the bottle. I tell you, I was ecstatic. Did you love being directed by him? We had a complicated relationship. He was a complicated man. Yeah. And I'm sure I was a complicated young actress, but, yeah. Great film, though. Yeah, thank you. Lily Bart is a million miles away from Dana Scully in terms of character and the time she was living. Yes. And thematically and everything. So was that important to put the kind of clear... Completely. ...clearably watered between them? Completely. And also, when the series ended, I was very careful about what I did next. I mean, I knew that I wanted to do theatre next and I came here to do theatre, but also I knew then after that that when I was offered Bleak House, that was the only type of series that I would say yes to.

25:51I didn't want to do series, I didn't even want to do telly. But that felt so different than Scully. It felt like it was a big enough challenge and it wouldn't, you know, continue to pigeonhole me.

26:12let's move on to your next choice for this cultural life julian and you've chosen meryl was she a role model for you as a young actor starting out yes i mean i i would probably say that if it if it weren't being in the school play where i was third from the left it was being in Grand Rapids, Michigan, watching television and Out of Africa being on.

26:47And I do think that it was absolutely Meryl's acting. You know, and interestingly, she seems to speak to all actresses of all ages, from all decades. and there's just something about her that... I don't even know how to put it into words, but I do know that, you know, in that moment that I was seeing her on screen, I thought... And it's similar to... I've heard musicians who say that I saw the cello or I saw the violin and I said, I want to do that. We've heard it on this program many times. Yes, and it was similar to that for me. It was, I want to do that. So it was Out of Africa, in which Meryl Streep plays a Danish woman who moves to Kenya to start a new life and she marries and has a very problematic marriage with a philandering husband, but then, of course, meets the big-game hunter played by Robert Redford.

27:41Yes, and I know that... I'm sure that there was an element of her character falling in love with Robert Redford that also... It appealed. ..contributed to my being completely gobsmacked by that film, but it was very much her. But I've gone ahead of my story, he'd have hated that. Dennis loved to hear a story told well. You see, I had a farm in Africa at the foot of the Ngong Hills. But it began before that. It really began in Denmark. Her as a presence on screen, what was her? Because she can change from film to film very dramatically, can't she? She's playing a Danish woman with an accent there.

28:29The thing is, I didn't know her other roles to know that she wasn't like that. I didn't know that she wasn't a Danish actress. Many years after Out of Africa, Meryl Streep played Margaret Thatcher in The Iron Lady. Of course, you played the Prime Minister, Mrs Thatcher, in season four of The Crown. What was the biggest challenge in portraying somebody who was physically and verbally so familiar to so many people who were watching The Crown? You know, a lot of people really hate her in this country and a lot of people really admire her. And so it was playing somebody who elicits such strong feelings one way or the other that it was that I think that was the biggest challenge.