Gillian Anderson Rewatches The X-Files, Sex Education, Scoop & More | Vanity Fair

Gillian Anderson - Actually, I'm looking forward to working with you. I've heard a lot about you. - Oh, really? - This is probably the most cringey scene I've ever done. When I look at it, it just looks awful when I see it. Hi, I am Gillian Anderson and today we're gonna be watching some scenes throughout my career. [upbeat music] The X-Files [tape rewinding] - I was under the impression that you were sent to spy on me. - If you have any doubt about my qualifications or credentials- - You're a medical doctor. You teach at the academy, you did your undergraduate degree in physics. Einstein's Twin Paradox, a new interpretation, Dana Scully's senior thesis. Now that's a credential, rewriting Einstein. - This is in the pilot episode. This is the first time that Scully and Mulder meet. It was my first series. It wasn't the show that Fox thought was gonna be their popular show. They had all their eggs and their money on something called Briscoe County or something like that, and this crazy, strange, unique, dark show ended up the number one show. It would get 42 million viewers on a Friday night. - Did you bother to read it? - I did, I liked it. It's just that in most of my work, laws of physics rarely seemed to apply. - Mulder's pinboard behind him became as famous as almost anything else in in the series, and particularly that "I wanna believe" poster. I probably have signed about 6 million "I wanna believe" posters in my life. - [Mulder] This is the substance found in the surrounding tissue. - It's organic. I don't know, is it some kind of synthetic protein? - Beats me, I've never seen it before either. - I don't think it was maybe until the second season that we realized how big it was. And I went from complete obscurity to, I mean, I don't even know how to talk about it. We won't talk about it right now. We're just gonna watch, watch, watch this scene in my squeaky voice. I'm a baby, this is me, the baby. - Do you believe in the existence of extraterrestrials? - Logically, I would have to say no. - David Duchovny and I met while we were auditioning for the pilot episode. There were a few actresses for Scully, and there were maybe three actors for Mulder. In the first week, Mulder was cast and it was David. And so in the second week, they were gonna cast the actresses to match up with David, and they weren't satisfied with the ones that they had, including me. They flew in some actresses from New York City to audition, and that included Jill Hennessy and Cynthia Nixon, who ended up on Sex and the City. - What I find fantastic is any notion that there are answers beyond the realm of science. The answers are there, you just have to know where to look. - We shot the first five seasons up in Vancouver, Canada. I think that fact went a long way to keeping us sane. When we would come down to Los Angeles, we couldn't go anywhere. We couldn't go to restaurants, we couldn't leave our houses. There was paparazzi everywhere. In the summers, I would sometimes go and do press around the world, and there was one year where I showed up at, you know, these book signings, I mean thousands and thousands, like 15, 20,000 people in each of the malls. I became aware of how big the show was. Well, that, and when somebody came up to the desk that I was sitting at and dropped his trousers and showed me the tattoo of my face on his butt cheek, and David was on the other butt cheek. Sex Education [upbeat music] - Jesus Christ, mom, get out, please. - While you are still under my roof, you are not to shut me out. [music blaring] [Otis growling] - Why are you so angry? - You're a hypocrite. - What, how? - This was the first time that I was offered a role that was comedy. It's always a shock when people offer me comedy because my resting face is serious. I really appreciated the fact that they thought that I might be able to play Gene Milburn, who is a sex therapist. She's a single mother of Otis, her son, and she is a bit morally ambiguous and a bit chaotic, and proceeds to get more and more chaotic as the season goes on. - You say you're all about honesty and clear communication, but you're not honest at all. You invade all your way into everything I do and then act like it's an accident. You cross multitudes of parental boundaries on a daily basis. You are a sneaky, sneaky woman. - Asa Butterfield's an extraordinary young actor. I think he was already 30 at this point when he was playing 16. I don't how, but he was a child star and just is a phenomenal actor. And so anytime that we actually came together to shoot scenes, it was such a joy to just throw everything at the wind and just be as inappropriate and as big and as crazy, and you know, slightly over the top. I'd never been asked to be over the top before, I think in my career, so that was fun. - I thought you were finally listening to me, that you were letting me be independent, but you just can't help yourself. It's like you want to consume me. You are like the spider moms that eat their own offspring. Like you think I'm somehow part of you. - Well, you are part of me. - I remember Asa and I were sitting in LA, doing press for it, and the woman who was interviewing us was Polish, and she was saying that there was no sex education in schools in Poland, and that this was her sex education. You know, that's quite a big bit of information. That's a big responsibility. And I don't think any of us necessarily, when we took on these roles, thought that a responsibility of that kind would be ours in saying yes to this, but because of the nature of the series and the fact that everything was on the table, it was so frank, it was bold. And we talk about pretty much everything to do with sex. And it shows the pain and the sorrow and the heartbreak and the joy and the messiness of life, and in a way that I don't think, you know, we'd ever actually really seen before on television. And playing Gene Milburn, her influence on my life as an actor and on my conversation started to influence my Instagram feed, and I started to post penis of the days and yonis of the days, and people would send images from nature to me that I would post about. And so it started this ongoing conversation that was embracing all kinds of sex and all kinds of human beings. [upbeat music] The Crown - [Photographer] Thank you. - The way those men patronized me, lectured me, the squires and grandies. - [Aide] Up in the clouds bastards. - I was cast in the show about a year before I was going to be acting in it, and, in wanting to get it right and the pressure of playing somebody who is both revered and despised, particularly in the UK, an incredibly divisive character that people feel very strongly about and know very well because of their strong feelings. - And their ideas, their solutions to the problems this country faces, so unimaginative and cautious and wet. - It was important to me that I try and make it as accurate as possible. So I started a year in advance, probably reading everything I could. She has a very compelling book that she wrote, but she also reads it herself. So it was an opportunity to hear about her life through her own words, which I found fascinating. - My father used to give a sermon, God needs no faint hearts for his ambassadors. They are faint hearts, and I should have kicked them out when I had the chance. - The degree to which religion played in her and her sister's lives. All of those things I found fascinating, and so I really kind of started from the beginning and then started working on physical and working on Thatcher's voice. And one of the best pieces of advice that I got was to not try and disappear too much into her. It was important that I keep an aspect of myself that makes sense for my casting and makes sense for the character. So to not try too hard to force myself into something that might become either rigid or inaccessible because it was trying to be too perfect, I could let it go a bit more and maybe be a bit more spontaneous. I found her incredibly fun to play. Hannibal [upbeat music] - Observe or participate. [foreboding music] - What? - Are you in this very moment observing or participating? - Observing. - I played Dr. Bedelia Du Maurier, Hannibal's psychiatrist. I was just gonna come in and do three episodes in the first season. Ended up doing a few episodes of the second season, and then did the third season. And it was just fun to play this very enigmatic, odd, sexy, possibly complicit psychiatrist. - Did you know what he would do? I would prefer your answer honestly. - I was curious. - We didn't know the direction that the writers were going to take our relationship. Every time a script came, it was new information. I think the writers were just having a ball. Brian Fuller, the exec producer and creator, said to me at one point that they would come up with the craziest paragraphs for me to say out of fun, to see whether I could make sense of the gobbledygook. - Is this what you expected? - Yes. - Important to get across was the degree to which she is aroused by what is happening. Why on earth is she there? I mean, I know she's titillated by him, but the fact that she got on a plane and went to Italy with him implies that there is something deeper between them. This is the first time he commits a murder in front of her. It was important to see the degree to which she is on the one hand completely terrified. And on the other hand, there's part of her that is definitely turned on by and enraptured by the danger and him. [upbeat music] The Fall - Drop the charade, Peter, own your confession. Have the courage of your convictions. Admit that you remember it all. - We did three seasons. I play detective superintendent Stella Gibson, and we finally have caught the serial killer called Specter. - I want to know the real me. - Then stop hiding behind the mask of amnesia. - We're all wearing masks to some extent. - In the series, Stella and Specter don't really cross paths. I am as obsessed with Specter as he is obsessed with the act of killing these young women, of not getting caught so that he can continue, and of teasing me in a sense. - It's time to take responsibility for what you've done. Stop this pathetic charade. - I was an exec producer on the series and involved in the hiring director and casting and had seen a lot of audition tapes, and Jamie Dornan's audition tape for this was above and beyond the most compelling. A lot of the series, he doesn't talk very much, but this was gonna be his first scene that would potentially present his acting skills. It was amazing because he's so good, and he's so good in this scene, and it was incredibly satisfying being involved in the process to see him unveil himself. [upbeat music] Scoop - Am I right in thinking you threw a birthday party for Epstein's girlfriend Ghislaine Maxwell at Sandranam? - No, it was a shooting weekend. - A shooting weekend. - Yes, just a straightforward, straightforward shooting weekend. - I play the journalist who interviews Prince Andrew, Emily Maitlis, and Emily is very well known in the UK. She's an incredibly formidable, very intelligent, very prolific journalist, and the fact that the BBC was able to secure an interview with the royal family, who rarely do interviews and had never before done an interview like this. But Prince Andrew agreed to do it, thinking that he would be able to clear his name from his relationship with the sex offender, Jeffrey Epstein. It went incredibly wrong, and he put his foot in his mouth so many times during the interview that he ended up having to step down from public office. - But during these times that he was a guest at Windsor Castle, at Sandranam, the shooting weekend, we now know that he had been procuring young girls for sex trafficking. - Emily is very much a part of life in London, and she's in my proximity. She has a particular way of dressing. Her hair is known, her constant tan is known, you know, they're all part of the news cycle somehow. And so taking her on when she's in my midst felt like it was even more risky potentially than Margaret Thatcher, who was deceased. Once I said yes, obviously the biggest part of this job was the interview itself. - We now know that. At the time there was no indication to me or anybody else. - [Gillian] The director had asked Rufus and I, Rufus Sewell plays Prince Andrew, if we would do it all in one go. This is Rufus's first day of work. They had recreated the south drawing room at Buckingham Palace to the T. We walk into this room, it is massive and it is identical. We sat down and got mic'd up and made sure that legs were crossed in the right way and paper was on the lap and pen was in the right hand, and then, you know, we were ready and he said, "Action." And what was crazy in the moment, it was the first time that I was hearing Rufus playing Andrew. And so as I'm saying my lines and asking questions, he is responding as Andrew, exactly as Prince Andrew had. I'm inside my head looking at him going, holy fuck. Like it's really good, it is like identical. I'd seen this interview so many times, and it was identical, but I can't react to it 'cause what I have to focus on is doing exactly what Emily did, and looking down at the right times, looking up, gesturing, writing, all that kind of stuff. - I wonder if you have any sense of guilt, regret, or shame. - Because we were held in this framework, essentially the real interview, the boundaries around that didn't allow me to fall off the side of it at all. There were moments where I felt so in it because I was being supported by, you know, this actor on the other side who was feeding me exactly what you would have wanted him to. It enabled it to just kind of turn over and turn over and keep going, and you could stay in it and ride this scene as if it was something that you had been rehearsing together, and there was an audience, and it just kind of flowed and carried itself. It's like we were on a wave that rolled all the way to the shore, and it was really cool. [tape rewinding] Thank you so much for watching. [logo chiming]