Gillian Anderson is best known for her role in The X-Files, but she admits there was a time when she didn’t really understand the sci-fi phenomenon.
“Because when you’re doing something like that, all everyone says is, ‘Oh my god, it’s a show, oh my god, it’s so great!'” And then you’re done. I don’t want to hear that,” he said on a recent episode of the Smartless podcast, hosted by fellow actors Will Arnett, Jason Bateman, and Sean Hayes.
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And then it hit her.
“Five years after the show ended, I suddenly understood what they were saying,” Anderson said. “I was like, ‘Yeah, that was kind of cool. I was on a really cool show.’
The X-Files originally aired from 1993 to 2002 and was revived in 2016 for two more seasons. She played Dana Scully, an FBI agent who teams up with David Duchovny’s Fox Mulder to investigate cold cases, on the 15-time Emmy Award-winning series.
Anderson said he just needed space after playing the role for so long.
“You know what happens when you’re on a long-running show, and it all intertwines and it’s not incestuous, but you literally feel like you’re, you’re living and breathing this. , you know, all the staff, “And I think we were ready to be done by the time we were done because we had nine years,” she said.
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Anderson said that he had been “breaking up” the series for a while.
“Before I said yes to the job, I wanted to get off the job and start doing what I thought would be my career,” she said. “You know, I was imagining being in the ‘Merchant Ivory’ movie, and I was imagining I’d be doing all this, you know? So, on the one hand, I was like, I just wanted to forget what happened and bounce back.” I went to do what I really wanted to do. ”
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Anderson has previously said he is grateful for what the show has done for his career, even if it was unexpected.
In January 2018, she told Variety, “At first I was very green and young and just exploring.” “I showed up, hit the mark, memorized my lines, and was drawn into the vortex of this hit show. It was my first proper professional gig and kind of a cannonball.”
In addition to playing Scully, Anderson also played former British Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher in 2020’s The Crown, former first lady Eleanor Roosevelt in the 2022 Showtime series The First Lady, and Netflix’s She also played the role of sex therapist Jean Milburn in “Sex Education” (2019). -2023) series.
