Gillian Anderson's latest role involves the royal family, but if you ask the two-time Emmy winner, the
British monarchy is by far the least interesting part of that story. Yes, her new film, ( Friday, April 5), centers on Prince Andrew's first sit-down interview about his friendship with convicted sex offender, the late financier, (which later resulted in him stepping down from official royal duties), but the more profound story here is how it happened. That's where Anderson comes in. She plays
BBC anchor and journalist, Emily Maitlis, who conducted the infamous 2019 interview after months of tenacious work by her producer, Sam McAlister (played by Billie Piper), to secure the booking. “I remember hearing about the interview, but I hadn't seen it right [away],” Anderson tells me over Zoom from her
New York hotel room. “I remember it being a really big deal, particularly in the
UK where I live.” And yet, Anderson (who was actually born in
Chicago and spent her adolescence between the
United States and the United Kingdom) don't really pay much attention to it. She watched clips eventually, noting that it was “ " she found it difficult to watch. “So studying it properly for the sake of re-creation [in ]…it's kind of extraordinary,” she says. Whether it was Prince Andrew or some other public figure in the hot seat, Anderson was only focused on one thing: getting it right, and doing right by Maitlis. As such, Anderson remembers sitting across from Rufus Sewell (who plays the disgraced prince) at an early read-through, and saying, “Oh my God, what have we got ourselves into?" Looking back, she says that while she definitely felt prepared, “sometimes regardless of how prepared you are, nerves can be extreme.” But if anyone's going to take a role by the horns and give it their all, it's the 55-year-old mother-of-three, who's also a recipient of the prestigious Order of the British Empire (OBE) for her contributions to the arts and sciences. Whether it's playing
FBI Special Agent Dana Scully in or , Anderson has carefully studied and executed every opportunity she's been given. It's only been recently though that she's started to have more fun with leaning into her public persona, and speaking about more than just . From women's sexual pleasure to , she's done being silent, and we're better off for it. So, for 's latest feature, Anderson opens up about the lessons she's unlearning now, reading to a then-Prince Charles, and why she's more than happy still being referred to as the “most bizarre girl.” I think I'm much more compassionate to the interviewers [especially because this] film is a behind-the-scenes look at the acquisition of the interview, and particularly the
Women who helped secure it and made it happen. And for me, I think I have gotten better at doing interviews over the years. In my early career, I was really, really nervous, to the point that I'd have to ask interviewers to ask questions over and over again because my brain would just shut down. Also, I'm much more lighthearted about it than I used to be. I think my fear often got in the way of being light. I was very serious back then. So, yeah, things have changed. Maybe I contributed to it because I took it so seriously for such a long time that the interviewer's take—for print [publications], particularly—on me was just so different than the experience that I thought we were having in the room, or that I would've thought they would've had. There's certainly been that. I think it was a picture many years ago of me talking about all the plastic surgery that I had had done, and which I hadn't had done, and so it was one of the very first tweets that I ever sent out. I don't normally comment on that stuff, but I felt compelled to comment on that one, just because it was so ludicrous. There's been so much, and lots of nonsense. I've met the
Queen a couple of times. When you live in the UK, sometimes you are invited to Buckingham Palace, and the picture that you're referring to was around the time I did , with Rowan Atkinson. You get 0.5 seconds to say hello. And the one with Prince Charles, I think, was way at the beginning of my moving to the UK. I had done , and I was invited for the anniversary of Dickens' birth. I must have been when I did , because I was asked to read a passage from to Prince Charles and the Duchess of Cornwall. It's funny because I forgot about all these. They're human beings, and he's very charming, and she was very sweet. I think I made a completely inappropriate joke, which is what I usually end up doing. But I felt honored that they'd asked me. It was being in Dickens' museum and getting to read a piece from an original text, so it was a wonderful experience. Well, when you're not British, it's not a member of the
Royal Family that present it to you. And I was going to be away for a long time, and wasn't going to be in town when whoever it was was going to be able to give it to me, so I asked if they could [ship] it to me. [ ] No, they're busy people. They can't do it for every Tom, Dick and Harry. They can't do it for every icon. For goodness sakes. [ ] It's interesting, because most of the time it's either , , , or . So, probably those four. When I got the role of Jean Milburn in , I was taking pictures on set of all of the penises and vaginas that Jean has in her house. And when I first wanted to start sending them out, the girl that does my
Instagram kept saying, "You can't, you'll get shut down. You can't send pictures of..." But then, things got a bit laxer. I don't know what point it switched over, but we started to do regular #penisoftheday and #yonioftheday. It could have been vagina of the day instead, but…because, for the #penisoftheday, there's the eggplant, the aubergine, and for the yoni, we usually put this flower. So the word yoni and the flower made sense. It felt like there was something more uplifting than saying #vaginaoftheday. So we landed on yoni. That's where that came from. And then, it just started this routine of posting those kinds of things. People started sending me pictures of yoni, or often penises or yonis in nature. There was this fantastic one that was a poodle looking out of a window, but the outline of the poodle looked like a penis, and the ball sacks on the side. And then yonis, and icebergs, and all that kind of stuff. So, it just started this trend and there were some highlights in there. Then I launched a functional drink that I decided to call , which further moved me into the world of all things around women's sexual health, sexual wellness, etc, and started to properly talk about that in a meaningful way. The charity that we decided that we were going to collaborate with, for the sake of the G-Spot drinks, was called Wellness of Women, and its cross-generational research into women's health and women's sexual health. And so, it started this ongoing conversation. I was approached to do a modern-day take on Nancy Friday's , which was a collection of anonymous letters from women around the world about their sexual fantasies. It felt like the right fit. I was curious to see what the differences are between today and the early '70s in terms of what's going on in women's heads when they think about sex and sexual fantasy, and the degree to which they are still—as a lot of the early letters showed—still wrapped up in a lot of shame and guilt and fear. Anyway, so yes, that's my world. Possibly. Very possibly. Since I've launched the drink, there are other avenues that I'm going down as well, more in an unconventional wellness route than necessarily traditional wellness, which has, over the last few years, become somewhat toxic. So, yeah, I could see having conversations in that type of format around all things having to do with women. Yeah, it's going good. I generally wear bras when I'm doing press because…well, there was a situation earlier today that required more than just a bra. You don't need to know all those details. But yeah, most of the time I do not. Actually, 99.9% of the time I am braless. I love that term, “unlearning,” and I think that I have gone through a great deal of my life hiding, in a way, veering more towards saying no to things, and not wanting to put my head above the parapet, or to really comment on things. I have a tendency to be very private and to not really raise my voice. And I think that in starting G-Spot and the other businesses around it has made me…realize that there are fans out there who have been impacted in a positive way, by either the characters that I've played, or by the charity work that I've done, or by things that I have said over time, and that it's okay to talk about them in a public forum. And maybe, in so doing, women will be inspired or feel more courageous in their own lives to ask for what they want, either from life or from their partner, or be of service, or take risks, no matter how scary they are. So, part of that is unlearning not shyness, but unlearning the desire to stay hidden and not talk about things publicly. Yeah, that's true. That says it all right there. It really does. You have no idea. I own that, “the most bizarre girl.” I love that. You're right. I must make a t-shirt or something. Oh, just ask my kids. They will give you a long list. Particularly my daughter. She's been compiling all the bizarre things about her mother over the years. When I die, there's going to be a tomb this thick of all the bizarre things that she has witnessed take place in her childhood. Glamour NYT .