“I’M THANKFUL ALL THE TIME THAT I STILL GET PAID FOR THIS THING THAT I LOVE DOING”
Gillian Anderson is hunkering down for a weekend in the English countryside - her accent matching her location: the idiolect of Jean Milburn from Sex Education rather than Scully from The X-Files. Though Chicago-born, Anderson’s peripatetic upbringing meant she spent formative years in the UK (living in London until she was 11) as well as the States, and as such, depending on where you find her - in project or continent - she can switch accents as easily as shedding a coat.
In a 32-year career, she’s managed to do the same with characters: essaying determined young agent Dana Scully to cult-following proportions in longrunning show The X-Files as easily as cut-glass Lady Dedlock in Bleak House, Hannibal’s shrink Dr. Du Maurier as effortlessly as DSU Stella Gibson from The Fall, or an Irish mother in The Mighty Celt and the Iron Lady in The Crown. She slips as seamlessly between stage and screen, mixing TV with film, celluloid with treading the boards, having won rave reviews for her raw West End performances in A Streetcar Named Desire, A Doll’s House and All About Eve.
Today, cosy in a black polo neck under a grey hoodie, she’s talking about her latest chameleon move: playing julia Marquis, the brittle wife of a doctor working at West Point Military Academy in 1830 in Scott Cooper’s Edgar Allan Poe-inspired detective story, A Pale Blue Eye. As Christian Bale’s Detective Landor investigates the grisly death of a cadet in deep midwinter he’s pulled into the orbit of Mrs Marquis - a primped, petticoated woman with a period-perfect emergingAmerica accent and fragile nerves.
Anderson, with extravagant hair and ruffles for days, may have fleeting screen time but her presence is immense as she smashes crockery during a fraught dinner and slip-slides around the icy Hudson Valley in a crinoline. “It was nice to have so many layers in that kind of weather, I have to say!” the 54-year-old laughs of filming in bitterly-cold Pittsburgh in November. “I mean, we slightly looked like cream puffs walking about, but that’s what itwould have been like!”
Though we’ve seen her playing corseted roles before, the psychology and precision of this character is new to Anderson - something she aspires to find in every role, no matter how many agents and detectives she’s managed to expertly render in her time.],” she admits as she reflects on her career. “There have been times when I thought, ‘Oh, not again,’ unless it’s something that feels like it’s almost the challenge, as much as anything, to find ways to make them as different as possible.”
