Gillian Anderson, Variety Icon Awardee, on Playing Radical Women and What She’s ‘Rebelled Against’ in Hollywood
variety.comManori Ravindran International EditorFew people can say their comfort zone is in playing strong women, but for Gillian Anderson, it ’s become something of a personal brand.The American-British actor, who was once best-known for her skeptical FBI agent Dana Scully in Fox’s long-running sci-fi hit “The X-Files,” has gone on to play detective Stella Gibson in “The Fall,” notorious British prime minister Margaret Thatcher in “The Crown” and sex therapist Jean Milburn in “Sex Education.” (And you wouldn’t want to cross any of them.)Anderson — who will receive the Variety Icon Award in a ceremony at CannesSeries on April 1 — will next be seen portraying the rarely dramatized Eleanor Roosevelt, opposite Viola Davis’ Michelle Obama and Michelle Pfeiffer’s Betty Ford, in Showtime’s drama “The First Lady.” But portraying no-nonsense women didn’t begin as a conscious choice for Anderson.
In 1993, she recognized a “stark difference” between the Dana Scully role and “pretty much everything else on television at the time,” though, at age 24, she wouldn’t have labelled Scully as the feminist icon she’d come to represent.“I don’t think it was as clear-cut in my mind as being, ‘Oh, this is a feminist character,’” she says. “I think that it was more of just, ‘This is a woman that I haven’t seen before on television, and she’s so unique.’”Yet Anderson describes a “knee-jerk reaction” to the sexist behaviors that were prevalent within the world of the show. “I was expected to walk behind [co-star David Duchovny] when [our characters] walked up to the front doors of the people we were investigating,” she says.
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