The Truth About Gillian I've Always Been An Outsider

On love, loss and leaving Mulder.

- Helena De Bortdodano

Ask Gillian Anderson a simple question and you get a simple answer. For example, why is she now leaving The X-Files after a quarter of a century playing FBI agent Dana Scully?

“Because.” She leaves the single word hanging in the air. It is a complete sentence, not the beginning of one. She softens the finality of it with a quirky lopsided smile. This is classic Gillian – accountable to no-one, enigmatic, slightly abrasive, captivating and very likeable.

Gillian turns 50 this year and has long said she wants to do other things. She’s been playing Scully on and off for half her life, even though The X-Files is not the sort of programme she watches.

“It’s not my cup of tea,” she tells us. “I tend towards documentaries.”

She’s an odd mixture of spiky and open. Gillian bristles when Woman’s Day uses the word “detached” to describe the characters she tends to play, yet the next moment, she is throwing out extraordinarily intimate details, telling us about her love affair with a woman who died of brain cancer.

Her appeal has more than stood the test of time. In 1996, Gillian was voted Sexiest Woman in the World by men’s magazine FHM and, 20 years later, in 2016, she was named one of the World’s Most Beautiful Faces by People. Early this year, her star was unveiled on the Hollywood Walk of Fame.

It is hard to emphasise quite how groundbreaking and iconic the role of Scully was back when The X-Files debuted in 1993. “You have to remember that what was on TV was Baywatch,” says Gillian. “That sort of female character did not exist before.”

We meet at Fox Studios in Los Angeles, where the actress has just launched the 11th season of the TVNZ 2 sci-fi drama. With short, white-blonde hair, Gillian looks more like an ethereal Marilyn Monroe than the flame-haired Scully.