Gillian Anderson played Agent Dana Scully for nine seasons on “The X-Files: Borderlands.” A series that she admitted to only having appreciated several years after its conclusion.
A necessary perspective. Guest of the “Smartless” podcast hosted by Will Arnett, Jason Bateman and Sean Hayes, Gillian Anderson spoke freely about her participation in the series “X-Files: On the Borders of Reality” in which she played agent Dana Scully , between 1993 and 2002, then in the two seasons broadcast between 2016 and 2018. The 56-year-old actress explained that she waited five years after stopping to fully appreciate the fiction created by Chris Carter.
“When you’re involved in a drama like this, all you hear is: ‘Oh my god, this show is great!’ And you can’t hear it anymore,” she said. “I finally understood what they meant five years after the series ended. I was like, ‘Yeah. It was pretty cool. I was in this series which was very nice,” continued the actress. Gillian Anderson explained this by the lack of perspective that one can have when working on the same series for so long.
“You know what happens when you’re in a long series is that everything mixes together (…) you feel like you’re living and breathing it all, the camera crews, the whole experience. And I think by the time the series was coming to an end – we did this for nine years (not counting the two additional years) I was more than ready to move on,” she confides.
Projects to realize
By the end of “The X-Files,” Gillian Anderson was eager to realize the projects she imagined at the start of her career. “I couldn’t wait to get this over with and start doing what I had always dreamed of doing before accepting this role. I wanted to be in the Merchant Ivory Productions films (Return to Howards End, The Remains of the Day, etc.), that sort of thing. Part of me wanted to forget what I had just done to get back to projects that appealed to me,” she said.
The actress is today very grateful for the tremendous opportunity that “X-Files: At the Borders of Reality” was in her career. A role which helped to make her known around the world, making her a leading actress who recently played former British Prime Minister Margareth Thatcher in the series “The Crown” in 2020, Eleanor Roosevelt in the series “ First Lady” on the American channel Showtime, or the therapist Jean Milburn in the hit series “Sex Education” on Netflix.
