Gillian Anderson Made Sure X-Files Would Never Be the Last Word

Gillian Anderson

Photo: Gabriel Hutchinson / CC BY-SA 4.0, via Wikimedia Commons

Born	August 9, 1968 Chicago, Illinois
Occupation	Actress
Known for	The Last King of Scotland, The Pale Blue Eye, The X-Files
Awards	2 Emmy · 2 Golden Globe · 2 SAG Award · OBE (Officer of the Order of the British Empire)

There is a moment in Gillian Anderson’s career that doesn’t appear on any award certificate. It came sometime in the early 2000s, when she decided that the most globally recognizable role in television was not the best thing that was ever going to happen to her. What followed that private decision — a methodical, unfashionably patient rebuilding of a career on the other side of the Atlantic — has continued for two decades and produced such a different body of work that the decision itself has become the clearest thing about her.

She was born in Chicago on August 9, 1968, but the biography that shaped her was assembled across three countries before she was eighteen. Her family moved to London when she was two, then to Puerto Rico, then back to London until she was eleven, then to Grand Rapids, Michigan, where she stayed until leaving for Chicago and DePaul University’s Theatre School. The restlessness was not incidental; it produced an actress who holds neither accent fully and is at home in both countries’ cultural codes without quite belonging to either. She earned her BFA in Theatre in 1990, trained under the National Theatre of Great Britain at Cornell, moved to New York at twenty-two, and won a Theatre World Award for her Off-Broadway work in Absent Friends in 1991.

Then came the audition she nearly did not get. The X-Files producers initially wanted someone more conventionally glamorous for the role of FBI Special Agent Dana Scully. Anderson got the part anyway. What she did with it — playing a scientist whose rationalism functioned as the show’s moral center across nine seasons — earned her the Emmy, the Golden Globe, and the Screen Actors Guild Award in the same year, 1997, making her the first actress to achieve that particular hat-trick in one calendar year. Scully became a cultural phenomenon: the red-haired skeptic who held her own in every room, a template for the onscreen female scientist that television has been trying to replicate ever since.

By 2002, Anderson had moved back to London and started making different choices. The transition was not announced; she simply appeared in things. Bleak House as Lady Dedlock in 2005, a BBC adaptation that earned her BAFTA and Emmy nominations. The Fall as DSI Stella Gibson, the Belfast detective whose relentless professionalism came packaged with something the show was careful never to sentimentalize or explain. Hannibal as Dr. Bedelia Du Maurier, a psychiatrist entangled with her patient in a manner that required Anderson to play complicity at precisely the angle where it stops being understandable. These were not the roles of someone consolidating a reputation. They were the roles of someone testing what the reputation could actually hold.

The stage work ran alongside. She played Blanche DuBois in A Streetcar Named Desire, first in London in 2014 and then touring in 2016, in a production directed by Benedict Andrews that stripped Williams’ play to its psychological mechanism. She won the Evening Standard Theatre Award and critical attention that would have surprised anyone who had only seen The X-Files. The point was not the award. The point was that she elected to do it at all — to stand in that theatrical tradition, with that text, measured against that history of the role.

Then came Margaret Thatcher. Anderson’s portrayal in Season 4 of The Crown, the Prime Minister’s early years opposite Olivia Colman‘s Queen Elizabeth, swept the awards season in 2021: Golden Globe, Emmy, SAG Award, Critics’ Choice. An American actress delivering the most politically divisive British Prime Minister of the twentieth century to a global Netflix audience, and winning on the critical terms that British viewers themselves apply. The irony is too precise to be accidental. She had not just crossed over; she had demonstrated that being an outsider to the character was part of the point.

There is a criticism worth naming. The X-Files returned in 2016 and again in 2018 to notices that were more complicated than the original series deserved, and Anderson has spoken about the difficulty of returning to a role in a different phase of a career — how a well-defined past performance creates a particular kind of ceiling in the present. Sex Education‘s Jean Milburn, the sex therapist mother she played across four Netflix seasons through 2023, was warmly received and demonstrated comedic range she rarely gets credited for; it also risked becoming another vehicle for her to be impeccably competent within a format not entirely of her own choosing. The question her career keeps generating — how to remain genuinely surprising when the audience already carries an established image of your face — does not have a clean answer. What she has been doing instead is keeping the question open by working.

In 2026, she has made three separate arguments for keeping it open. The Salt Path, released in late August, stars her alongside Jason Isaacs as a couple who walk 630 miles of England’s Southwest Coast Path after losing their home and receiving a terminal diagnosis — a biographical drama directed by Marianne Elliott that has earned particular attention for what Anderson does in its quieter passages. Earlier in August came Teenage Sex and Death at Camp Miasma, Jane Schoenbrun’s queer slasher film in which Anderson plays a reclusive actress with a fraught relationship to her own mythology — a meta-premise that works because she commits to its being entirely real. The film premiered at Cannes and won the Queer Palm. Anderson has spoken publicly about her own fluid sexuality, and the casting is not unrelated to that public positioning, but the performance stands independently of the biographical hook.

The third argument is the one starting on September 21 at @sohoplace in the West End. Martha, in Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf?, is ferocious: she tears through every mask in the room, refuses comfort, and doesn’t allow the audience to look away from what it finds beneath. Anderson is playing her opposite Billy Crudup in a production directed by Marianne Elliott, the same director she made The Salt Path with earlier this year. That she has elected to end a year of two films with this, at this stage of a career built on precisely that quality, suggests an actress who has never stopped deciding what to do next.