OUT THERE

In midlife, Gillian Anderson is proving that she’s not so buttoned-up.

- REBECCA MEAD

“Have you turned me on?” Gillian Anderson asked, as she walked swiftly from her trailer on the back lot of a studio in Calgary, swishing up the hem of the long woolen skirt she was wearing to check whether a microphone transmitter affixed to a leather boot was functioning. It was mid-June, and Anderson had been based in Alberta since May, filming “The Abandons,” a lavish new Netflix drama set in Oregon in the mid- eighteen hundreds. Her boots were scuffed and grimy; the previous day, she’d been shooting scenes on horseback, on location in the foothills of the Canadian Rockies, in her role as Constance Van Ness, a flinty matriarch who has inherited, and substantially increased, the mining fortune made by her late husband. “It’s dust, dust, dust for days, and then mud, mud, mud for days,” she told me, with relish.

Anderson’s career was forged in Canada. When she was in her mid- twenties, she was cast as the F.B.I. agent Dana Scully in “The X-Files,” the sci-fi drama that débuted on Fox in 1993. “I got the job on a Thursday, and I was needed in Vancouver on the Saturday,” Anderson said. The first five seasons were shot in British Columbia, and the show’s dark, gloomy aesthetic was partly a product of the region’s meteorological conditions. “The X-Files,” which ran for nearly a decade, turned Anderson from a couch- surfing unknown into a globally recognized star, and introduced a novel kind of character to network television.