Prince Andrew Netflix film to put the spotlight on women Scoop is based on book by Sam McAlister who negotiated the sit-down in which Duke was questioned about his friendship with Jeffrey Epstein At first glance, they are the familiar images of Emily Maitlis and Prince Andrew in their notorious Newsnight interview.
But this is Gillian Anderson and Rufus Sewell in Scoop, a Netflix film which recreates the 2019 encounter in meticulous detail.
Sewell spent three hours a day in the make-up chair to resemble the Duke of York, while Anderson studied the interview and watched episodes of Newsnight to capture Maitlis’s mannerisms.
The film, due for release in spring, is a behind-the-scenes look at how the interview was secured and the way it unfolded, framed as a tribute to the work of the four women responsible.
It is based on Scoops by Sam McAlister, the “booker extraordinaire” on Newsnight who negotiated the interview in which the Duke was questioned about his friendship with convicted sex offender Jeffrey Epstein.
McAlister is played on screen by Billie Piper. In addition to Anderson as Maitlis, the film features Keeley Hawes as Amanda Thirsk, the Duke’s right-hand woman. Romola Garai plays Esme Wren, the Newsnight editor. “It’s rare that you see a representation of women, all in their 40s and 50s. This is an opportunity to see hard-working women behind the scenes at every stage,” McAlister told The Telegraph.
She was on set during filming and said Anderson’s likeness to Maitlis is “astonishing”.
“It felt like being there with Emily,” McAlister said. “Everything about her physicality and her performance is on the money. They have a similar intellect as well. Emily is very methodical. She worked very hard on every interview; she trains, she studies. And my impression of Gillian was exactly the same. She was studying the material, she was studying Emily, and she was working on that project in an intellectual way as well as a dramatic way.”
Philip Martin, Scoop’s director, said of Sewell: “Rufus spent about three hours in the make-up chair. He started really early in the morning and had to go through this strange process of putting a bald wig on before the other stuff went on. We worked very hard to make all of the prosthetics flexible and light enough so that he could act through it all.”
“With Gillian, there are no prosthetics – it’s make-up and a wig and mannerisms,” said Martin
Both actors spent hours watching the interview as part of their preparation, and Anderson also studied Maitlis’s presenting style on Newsnight.
“Sometimes people can do a really brilliant impersonation but not capture something about the person. What Gillian and Rufus have done so brilliantly is get the spirit of the people that they’re playing, so that it feels real,” said Martin.
The room at Buckingham Palace in which the interview took place is also recreated in minute detail, and the camera angles from the original BBC interview are matched exactly. The film, with a script by Peter Moffat, will not be a hatchet job on the Duke. “We don’t take a side – we’re not saying, ‘Oh, isn’t he great,’ or, ‘Oh, isn’t he evil’. It’s for the viewer to draw their own inferences,” said McAlister.
Martin, who also directed the first two series of The Crown, said: “I think lots of people would tie themselves up in knots because they didn’t want to appear to approve of Andrew, or to disapprove of him. Rufus wasn’t afraid of that.
“Andrew was slightly the Harry of his era – he was seen as a great communicator with great people skills in his 20s and 30s, a person who could get things done. I think Rufus really understood that side of things, and the sense that Andrew is older now but has a sparkle and a kind of charisma to him.
“It doesn’t feel like we’re pointing an arrow at him and saying, ‘This is a bad guy…’. You’re seeing a person, and that’s a real tribute to Rufus’s take on it.”
The Duke was pilloried for his answers to Maitlis, which included a claim that he was physically unable to sweat and an alibi placing him in the Woking branch of Pizza Express.
‘A bounce and a bite to it’ Martin said the tone of the film would reflect the absurd elements of the interview as well as the serious issues at hand.
“There was something slightly surreal about the whole process. So we’ve tried to make it have a bounce and a bite to it. It moves fast and it’s absorbing to watch.”
McAlister, a criminal barrister before joining the Newsnight team, left the BBC to write her book and said it felt “bonkers” for her behind-the-scenes producer role to be the subject of a Netflix film.
Scoop is one of two dramatisations in the works.
Maitlis is making her own three-part drama covering her career and culminating in the Newsnight interview.
“It’s nice that there’s so much interest in the story and I’m really looking forward to watching Emily’s,” McAlister said.
She lamented the cuts to Newsnight, which will see the BBC Two show curtailed to a half-hour slot with fewer staff.
“It’s a real shame. This story changed the course of journalistic history. It was a huge thing, and where do you get that kind of journalism? The places that you get it now are diminishing by the second, so to see Newsnight culled is painful because the powerful will sleep more comfortably in their beds at night.
“It’s a very important type of journalism and it’s disappearing before our eyes,” McAlister said.
However, she acknowledged that Newsnight’s viewing figures are falling. “It’s what I call ‘the beautiful hypocrisy’,” she said.
“I often do events where people say, ‘Newsnight’s amazing, I can’t believe it’s being culled’. And then I’ll politely enquire when they last watched it, and 90 per cent of the time they haven’t watched it for two or three years. The space between what people value in theory and what they actually consume is quite vast.”
“The decision to do [Scoop] had so much more to do with would I have the balls to play Emily Maitlis?”
If there’s one thing that’s true about Gillian Anderson, it’s that she isn’t afraid of a challenge. And that’s exactly what she’s doing in her new film, tackling the role of journalist Emily Maitlis in Netflix‘s Scoop (April 5), which documents the team behind the bombshell 2019 BBC interview with Prince Andrew over his involvement with Jeffrey Epstein. For Anderson, who won an Emmy for playing Margaret Thatcher in The Crown, she didn’t see it as another project about the royal family. “It wasn’t until afterwards when people started asking me that and I was like, ‘Really? Well, I didn’t even think about it.'” [laughs] What stood out to Anderson was the various portrayals of women involved in making the interview happen. “They are all incredibly powerful forces in their own rights, but also completely unique and different characters.” Anderson, whose legions of fans date back to her days on The X-Files, is using that popularity to talk about women’s sexual health with her new energy drink line G Spot, targeted for women, but made for everybody.
Did you have any reservations about doing another film that revolves around the royal family?
What’s so funny is that I’ve had people reminding me that this has something to do with the royals. When I first took it on, even though obviously it’s a big part of the story, to me that’s not the big part of the story. And yes, we are talking about two old establishments in the U.K. and one of those establishments is a royal family, but [one] involves a prince. The decision to do it had so much more to do with would I have the balls to play Emily Maitlis, who is, at least over here [in the U.K.], is so much a part of our consciousness. Not least her podcast, which I was already listening to pretty much on a daily basis, but also her history with the BBC and how she left the BBC. I wasn’t even thinking, ‘”Oh, it’s another story that involves the royal family,” because so much of it is all in the BBC. It’s all in the show. Except for those couple of scenes [for] the big interview, which obviously is in a wing of Buckingham Palace. It wasn’t until afterwards when people started asking me that and I was like, “Really? Well, I didn’t even think about it.” [laughs] That’s compartmentalization.
Gillian Anderson in Netflix’s ‘Scoop.’PETER MOUNTAIN/NETFLIX
One of the main elements of this film is the interview. How do you put your personal stamp on it when everyone has watched this video?
How do you tell this story, period? When everybody knows the end result? Right? I really feel like they figured out how to do that and it felt evident even in the script. It felt new and fresh and propulsive, very much like a thriller. And so for me, as much as anything it was about finding out whether I thought that the director, in speaking to him about it, would be able to create as muscular, thriller-type story as I was reading on the page. Because those two things don’t necessarily come to fruition. What you see when you sit down in the movie theater is what you were imagining, it might be based on what you read and is not always the case. So, I was a big fan of Peter Moffat’s writing.
Emily as a character is very interesting. We know so much of her work, but we also see her having to balance the journalism with the impact her persona will have on the story. She’s just as much part of the story, in a way. Did that stand out to you?
Once I started doing the research and I went back to look at the interview from a different perspective, I was impressed with how gentle she was with him at the beginning. I mean, obviously, she eventually leans in quite heavily, but she starts very gentle. She’s fierce, particularly with politicians and holding authority to account, but there was strategy, whether that was her own strategy or Sam McAlister’s—this is Sam’s version of events. There was a rehearsal over a three-day period, how the questions we’re going to be asked, and the tone to take and the degree to which his level of privilege would influence his answers or how he perceived her or how he perceived the questions. One of the things that they discussed was about the degree to which he is so used to being right and being listened to and not interrupted that you could use that knowledge of how he will likely respond based on that to track your path toward getting him to actually answer the questions. Because at any moment he could have walked away, right at any moment if she pushed too hard or seemed disrespectful. At any point he could have said, “Forget this, I’m not doing you this favor anymore.”
Gillian Anderson (L) and Rufus Sewell (R) in Netflix’s ‘Scoop.’ PETER MOUNTAIN/NETFLIX
What struck me were the women at the center of this story, Maitlis and McAlister in particular. Two women holding accountable the men in positions of power. Did that have an impact on you?
It definitely feels to me like it stands out more in the film than I had necessarily noticed it on the page. That is interesting, and I’m glad that that stands out. But by the same token, one thing I really love about the script is the degree to which you have all of these women and they are all incredibly powerful forces in their own rights, but also completely unique and different characters, their personalities are incredibly different and well-drawn. Some of that is obviously really good casting, but also in the dialogue, you feel like everybody has a unique perspective.
You have a pattern of playing unique women who are badass in their own particular way. Whether it be Dana Scully on The X-Files or Margaret Thatcher or Stella Gibson in The Fall or Jean Milburn in Sex Education and now Emily Maitlis. How do you choose your roles, and is being badass intentional?
People generally come to me with stuff that they would imagine I might be interested in playing and I think, not that I’m necessarily typecast in a way, because I don’t feel like I am, but now what people are coming to me with are presidents of the United States and stuff. [laughs] I’ve been incredibly lucky in terms of what has come my way. And a lot of it is, no doubt, it’s the same person over the years making the decisions, so therefore the common denominator is me saying “yes” or “no” to things. And it’s clear that I’m more likely to say yes to something if it feels like it’s more three dimensional or complex or whatever, but certainly, you could put badass on there as well; that’s probably something that I lean more toward than another adjective.
I mean, whenever I’m watching your stuff, I’m just like, “She’s badass.”
It’s very interesting for people to read the scripts before to see whether they actually contain any badass or whether I’ve just forced them into that.
David Duchovny and Gillian Anderson star in year 6 of “The X-Files.” (1999) FOX/LIAISON
I’ve been a fan for a long time, and I feel like as a fan, we all have that one series of yours we’re dying for more of. For me, it’s The Fall. For others it’s X-Files, among others. How does that feel, that us fans frankly can’t get enough of you?
I guess that to a certain extent that proves how lucky I’ve been, to be able to be a part of some of these iconic shows like The X-Files. I certainly feel like we answered that call from the fanbase ad nauseam. By the end we kept coming back and coming back, and I feel like we definitely showed up for that.
With The Fall, it’s something that I think we all were interested in, potentially having at least one more season. Or a character like Stella feels like a character that you could drop into at any stage, and I don’t necessarily feel that it’s completely done. We did try for a fourth [season] at one point, we were toying with various things. Allan Cubitt, the writer and showrunner, was playing around [with it] for a while and I’m not sure what the at the end of the day [happened], but I particularly get it with her and feel the same way. Even though it’s stalled at the minute, that doesn’t mean it can’t happen in the future. That is an example of a script and a project that was really unique in a way, just the quality of the writing. I think those characters, in my experience, only come around once a decade.
But to your point in terms of my fans, over time [they] have really followed my journey, and it’s amazing. I’m incredibly grateful. Also, they seem to embrace pretty much whatever the decision it is that I make, whether it’s TV or film or even theater. They show up very often, over and over again to see plays that I do and so I feel very lucky to have such a long-lasting fan base. And also that there seems to be more people still discovering X-Filesand people discovering Dr. Jean [Milburn from Sex Education] and that’s a new kind of fan base. And I’m getting more involved in other areas. I’ve got a drinks brand now and that’s growing into various other things. So it feels like I’m being told what it is in a way that the fan base is…what is this that they want and they expect. Now that I’m in conversations with brand specialists, these questions are being asked, they’re doing research, which I’ve never done in my life on my own. But people are coming back to me saying, “This is what they say out there. This is what they expect. This is who they are. These are the age ranges.” That’s all new to me. But it’s great, it’s all positive.
Gillian Anderson attends the 81st Annual Golden Globe Awards at The Beverly Hilton on January 07, 2024 in Beverly Hills, California. AMY SUSSMAN/GETTY IMAGES
You have been going viral lately, what with your red-carpet fashions, your Instagram and now your drink brand. Did you ever see yourself as such a social media darling
On the on the one hand, [I’m] becoming aware of it really for the first time in the last year since the drink has launched. And since I’ve started to talk to various people about how to grow it. We’re bringing it into the States. But those are the kind of conversations not just that I haven’t had, but I haven’t ever wanted to have. So, it’s taken other people to kind of turn me around by the shoulders and say, “Look at this. Pay attention to what the potential is here.” Because people on the one hand seem to be really drawn to the characters that I play for one, right? So starting to look at what is it about these particular characters that makes people say, create a bumper sticker that says, “What would Stella do?” Right? So, what is that? What are they getting here? And not just through characters, but in other ways. Can we find ways to answer that? Because the fan base, because of X-Files,and because of Jean Milburn, and because the demographic is so wide that’s inclusive of everybody. We’re not just a drinks brand, we’re not just focusing on women, per se. Yes, there needs to be more healthy drinks that are skewed toward women, particularly energy drinks, because so many of them are so not very good for you. But there’s also equity and diversity and inclusion. There are so many things that when the brand people say, “Okay, these are the things that you seem to represent, why not take advantage of those things to create something that makes people want to come because they feel safe and represented and respected, and that there’s a platform to share there?” So that’s where we’re headed.
Well, I think that also has to do with this badass thing, people want to feel part of that, whatever the energy is that you’re putting out there, which is why I want the drink here in the States.
But what’s interesting is they’re responding to it as if it’s something that’s out there. And what we’re trying to have the conversation about is to what degree it already exists inside you. So that’s the thing. It’s not me. It’s not the characters. That exists already inside you.
I’m leaving this interview feeling like I’m badass now. [laughs] I need to ask you about your forthcoming book Want. What struck you as most poignant in collecting these essays from women?
The degree to which women are very often afraid to express what it is that they want to their partners, particularly in bed in an intimate way and in a special way that many women—I won’t say the majority—but I feel like it was a very large percentage when we did the poll. Women are more likely to reach climax separate from their partners because they don’t want to waste his or her time, or they don’t want to feel like it takes too long. They don’t know how to share with them what they want. I’m interested in that because I think that’s fascinating. So that also surprised me in these letters, the degree to which women wrote about that.
It’s lunchtime on the day of Scoop’s London premiere and the corridors of the Langham hotel are abuzz with activity. There’s Rufus Sewell in the corner, weighing up his outfit options for the evening (“I feel like sometimes you can wear something pink… but not today?” – I later saw that he wore head-to-toe black); Keeley Hawes, who runs over from the other end to hug a publicist; and later Sam McAlister, the former booker of Newsnight and the new Netflixfilm’s executive producer, who penned the book on which it’s based, Scoops: The BBC’s Most Shocking Interviews From Steven Seagal to Prince Andrew.
Conspicuous in her absence is Billie Piper, who dons giant sunglasses and leather trousers to play McAlister in the forthcoming release – a behind-the-scenes look at how the decade’s most explosive royal interview was secured, from director Philip Martin and writer Peter Moffat – opposite Sewell’s Prince Andrew and Hawes as the Duke of York’s private secretary, Amanda Thirsk. So too is the woman I’m here to speak to today: Gillian Anderson, who puts on her military jacket and perfects her very precise bob before going into battle with her interviewee as the formidable Emily Maitlis.
Then suddenly, she’s arrived – surprisingly petite and shivering from the chill in the room we’re due to speak in, so much so that she pulls out a terry-cloth robe from the wardrobe and puts it on over her silk shirt. We’ve met before, but in the course of our conversation, I notice something subtly different in the way she bends her head and in the slight curve of her lips – shades of Maitlis, as if the character still hasn’t fully left Anderson’s body.
In Scoop, there is something almost eerie about the actor’s embodiment of her – the distinctive voice, her expressions, the way she moves her hands, all familiar to audiences who’ve watched her on the BBC for over a decade, are replicated with immense precision. McAlister is the story’s undisputed lead, liaising with Thirsk to persuade Prince Andrew to commit to the interview, but Maitlis comes a close second. Slinking around the BBC offices with her pet whippet Moody in tow, she’s a force of nature who is determined to hold the Duke to account.
She throws herself into preparations and, on the big day itself, keeps her cool, cutting through the Prince’s bluster with ease to get to the truth of the matter, and leaving him utterly exposed in the process. Throughout, it’s clear that she feels an enormous sense of responsibility to get the interview exactly right. If they don’t, her editor Esme Wren (Romola Garai) tells them, it’s not the Duke, but the BBC that’ll be the story. “No,” Maitlis replies. “It’ll be me.”
She’s masterful but, then again, we’ve come to expect nothing less from Anderson. The 55-year-old American-born, partly London-raised screen legend has always thrown everything into the characters she plays – from The X-Files’s Dana Scully to The Fall’s Stella Gibson, Sex Education’s Jean Milburn to The Crown’s Margaret Thatcher – and collected four SAG Awards, two Emmys and two Golden Globes along the way.
As we count down to Scoop’s release on 5 April, Anderson tells us why she initially turned down the role of Maitlis, how she recently ran into the real Maitlis in Hyde Park, and her upcoming book which compiles over 100 anonymous letters from women discussing their most intimate sexual fantasies.
I read that you initially avoided watching the Newsnight interview because you heard it was such a car crash. When did you finally get around to watching it?
I actually can’t remember whether I watched it within a certain period of it airing, or whether it was after I’d agreed to do Scoop. Once I’d signed on, I thought, “Right, I’ve seen clips but I actually need to commit some time to watching it.” And when I did… the conversation they have, it feels like the two of them are almost speaking two different languages? There’s such a disconnect. And it makes you ask questions like: why would someone put themselves in that position? How did that even happen? And that’s what our film is about – it’s about the women who were involved in making this happen.
I know you turned down the role at first, because it felt too tricky. What made you change your mind?
It was the script. I didn’t want to turn it down because I liked the script so much, but at the same time, it felt like, why subject myself to potential punishment? [laughs] But then, I was zooming with Peter Moffat, the writer, and Philip Martin, the director, and I was giving them all the reasons why I shouldn’t do it. And they said, “Well, you know that means you have to do it, right? Because it’s so potentially scary.”
What did you learn from the script about the behind-the-scenes story that you didn’t know before?
Initially, it was the fact of how many people it takes in order to secure interviews. I also found the rehearsal process for the interview fascinating. I don’t know if that’s part of the process outside of a scenario like this where it’s such a big deal, but, in Sam’s telling of it, it seemed important to understand who Prince Andrew was, how he’s likely to respond to certain types of questions, and how to not make him run away. They had to appeal to him and make him feel at ease, or at least make him feel that he didn’t need to be frightened of Emily or afraid of the process. It’s a very delicate dance. And planning the structure of the interview – part of the joy of the drama is seeing the degree to which Emily follows that or doesn’t, at the end of the day, and the consequences of that.
Can you also talk to me about perfecting her voice, mannerisms and physicality?
So I read Emily’s memoir about what it’s like to do her job, but I also listened to it because she reads the audiobook. She’s very self-deprecating and funny. I also studied interviews she’d done on YouTube. There’s so much footage out there. It’s also really interesting to watch what she does in an interview while the other person is talking. And, obviously, that’s specifically interesting in this interview. I felt like this with Thatcher too – a six-part BBC documentary came out, by the grace of God, right when I was doing my research to play her, and there were some moments when she was preparing for a speech. The camera was on her, but I don’t think she knew that it was rolling yet. So, you see her unguarded and it’s not performative. She’s so used to being in the public eye, but that was just one of those moments that I find the most interesting.
That very precise bob and the military jacket also helped your transformation into Emily. What are the details in that costuming that are worth looking out for?
So, Emily has a few military jackets – it’s part of her look and something she seems to like. She’s got two, maybe even three of varying lengths. And so one would automatically assume that she’d choose one for this interview because it’s appropriate, because it’s Andrew and he was in the navy and so on. But to me, the interesting thing was how buttoned up it was, all the way up to under the neck. So, how much of that is armour? Also, the choice to wear trousers when she is wearing quite short skirts so much of the time. We see a lot of leg in her interviews, so you know she’s confident there. All those little things were very telling.
I also love how she uses her pen – it’s very precise, almost like a scalpel that cuts through the bluster.
She always has it resting and it’s in this very particular way. I don’t know whether it just felt strange to me because it was in my left hand and I’m right handed, but… she’s quite confident with it and she’s used to having it. It’s pretty much there in every sit down interview.
What was it like filming that interview scene opposite Rufus, who is so unsettling in this role?
It was one of the first things we filmed. By that point, I’d studied that interview so much. I listened to it over and over, and I had a shortened version of it which was the 10 minutes [in the film] that I edited down to an mp3 and a video. I watched his side, but I was mostly listening to the beginning and the end [of what he said] because those were my cues. So, when I sat across from Rufus and the cameras were rolling, on one hand, my brain knows this is when she looked down and looked up and this is when her hand moves and she refers to her notes, but at the same time, I was watching Rufus and thinking, “Oh my God, he’s amazing.” It was almost like a dance. That was the first time we were sat in front of each other because we never rehearsed it. It was really surreal.
Having studied the interview so much, what do you think the key was to Emily’s success?
I found it interesting the degree to which she’s gentle at the beginning. She’s often not – she’s quite terrifying in some of her interviews, but then some of her questions are actually quite tough. She doesn’t let him off the hook. She asked the same questions a couple of times in different ways. She pulls him up on things and she lets him hang himself, so to speak, on certain things. I’d imagine it would have been really hard to not respond to some of those things that he said in real time. She just trusted that we’d see those things for what they were. And then it wouldn’t seem like she manipulated the situation or tried to make him flustered by asking too many questions. She just asked the questions. And there’s a definite brilliance in that.
Like when he talks about his “straightforward shooting weekend” with Jeffrey Epstein and she just doesn’t react.
It’s probably one of my favourite lines [laughs]. She locks eyes with him but she’s not fazed. She’s like, “Right.”
The film also gives us a sense of what’s motivating Emily because she says at one point that she has regrets about a previous interview in which she didn’t ask Bill Clinton about Monica Lewinsky, and felt like she let women down as a result. Was that in her memoir?
It was – I think that interview with Clinton was in India, and he was there with a charitable organisation that works specifically to support women. So it was a double whammy. I’ve been in his presence and it’s unbelievably daunting. I can understand how frustrating that would have been. Regardless of the degree to which that was the motivation for this interview, there’s no doubt that it was somewhere in there. It was particularly important in this case, given all the young women involved, that she ask questions on their behalf for the sake of the truth. That’s why independent public service journalism is so important to society.
The film is a real testament to its importance. What do you hope viewers leave it with?
I really like the film and, you know, one doesn’t always get to say that [laughs]. The meat and musculature of the script makes it quite unique – it feels modern and propulsive, like a proper thriller. Even though we all know this story inside out, and I know the story behind the scenes inside out, too, when I was watching it, it was tense. I was thinking, “Are they going to lose this?” That’s good filmmaking.
I know you didn’t meet Emily before filming because she’s working on her own retelling of this story, but I heard that you did run into her recently?
It’s actually happened on a couple of occasions. The first time we met, people introduced us and I was overly familiar because, of course, I knew her inside and out, and to her I was a complete stranger. So that was weird and I’m sure a little bit creepy. The second time, I actually saw her in Hyde Park. I was walking my dog, and there’s this bin we stop at where my dog knows to sit before I take off her lead and she runs for me to throw her a ball. And I bent down, and this woman moved between me and the bin and this dog moved between us. All of a sudden my brain just went “Moody!” And that’s when I looked up and saw her, and I almost said, “Hey! I just saw our film!” I’d literally seen it the night before. As if it was ourfilm [laughs]. Thankfully, something stopped me. I just stood there.
The whippet in the film is great, it has to be said. Did you get to bond?
That dog only bonds with its owner. It was in a very codependent relationship with its owner which made that challenging [laughs]. But it was great fun to wander through the halls of the BBC together.
Finally, I’d love to ask you about your book, Want, which compiles anonymous letters from hundreds of women which discuss their sexual desires. What made you want to put it together, and what did you learn from the process about what we as women are able and unable to ask for?
Initially, the book was an attempt to do a kind of modern day version of Nancy Friday’s 1973 book My Secret Garden, where she asked women to write anonymous letters about their fantasies and send them to her. She waded through them all and chose certain ones to include. I wanted to look at the degree to which things might have changed after the sexual revolution, the rise of pornography, and all of the things that we see on television today, including shows like Sex Education. In all these different mediums, we can have a very different conversation about sex out in the public now, compared to back then.
It was important that we figured out a way to create a portal so that women could write in and feel safe that their letter was totally anonymous. And it was important that it was multicultural and multinational. We got 800 letters and we ended up with about 174. It was a lot of editing but I really enjoyed that process of choosing which letters would follow which. There are so many ways in which things haven’t changed. There’s still shame and guilt and women really struggling to ask for what they want in relationships and even having those conversations with their partners. I found that both surprising and not surprising. It was fascinating.
LONDON, ENGLAND – MARCH 27: Gillian Anderson attends the World Premiere of “Scoop” at The Curzon Mayfair on March 27, 2024 in London, England. (Photo by Dave Benett/WireImage)
Her uncanny portrayals of famous women have brought her legions of fans. Now, as she prepares to play Emily Maitlis in the pivotal Prince Andrew interview, the actor talks to Eva Wiseman about acting, soft drinks and ‘side hustles’
I have a tendency to be cast as those types of women who have unbelievable brains,” says Gillian Anderson, running her hands through her glamour of blonde hair, “because my resting face is intellectual, as if I’m thinking about Proust or the world order. When in fact it’s usually, actually, dinner.” The next unbelievably brained woman Anderson will play is British journalist Emily Maitlis, in Scoop, a film about the process of securing her 2019 Newsnight interview with Prince Andrew. This was the interview in which he discussed his friendship with sexual predator Jeffrey Epstein, his inability to sweat, and the Woking branch of Pizza Express, and, in 50 fast minutes, managed to do more damage to the royal family than five seasons of The Crown.
This will not be the first time Anderson has played a “real person” on screen. After growing up in London and moving to Michigan at 11, she found community in the punk scene as a teenager, before lurching into wild fame in her 20s as Agent Scully in The X-Files, later being cast as Wallis Simpson, Eleanor Roosevelt and, memorably, Margaret Thatcher. Now 55, with three children, she is both curious about and resigned to her status as “world’s sexiest woman”. When Emily Maitlis heard Anderson was to play her, she told GQ: “I have teenage sons, so that was hormonally complicated.”
There has been a low hum of distrust online about the way that Newsnight interview has so quickly become, somehow, an entertainment franchise. This Netflix film (in which Rufus Sewell plays Andrew) will be followed by another, separate series (in which Ruth Wilson will play Maitlis), and in 2022 there was a comedy musical about the interview that rhymed “pizza Fiorentina” with “friend soliciting a minor”. One criticism has been that we are memorialising a moment before it has been processed. But I was relieved upon watching Scoop that it is dark, and suitably thrilling. “I had the same reaction!” says Anderson. “It’s properly interesting and surprising, isn’t it?”
It sort of goes without saying by now – all of us having enjoyed Anderson for many decades as an actor who brings an elegant mischief to her intellectual women – that she is exquisite in this role. But here she appears somehow to be even more Maitlis than Maitlis herself – a meta-Maitlis maybe, describing with her mannerisms and demure ferocity a glittering kind of feminine power, and elevating the story so it becomes less about Prince Andrew and more about the collaborative efforts of a group of women who, as Anderson says, “hold power to account”.
They filmed the interview first, with minimal rehearsal. “Sitting opposite Gillian as Emily Maitlis was an extraordinary feeling,” Rufus Sewell tells me. “Her relentless, laser-like focus, and uncanny vocal and physical resemblance to the woman I’d been studying alongside Andrew all this time made it suddenly quite easy to squirm.” He’s worked with Gillian before: “I’ve always been a fan of hers and the palpable sense of will that she brings to a character. It’s a formidable thing to be up against and I relish it. She made it very hard for Andrew and somehow easier for me.”
Because Maitlis is involved in the competing series she declined to meet Anderson, so it was a shock when the two accidentally came face to face recently at a charity event. “I had literally driven in from the country, having spent a week in mud with kids on the side of some hill. I didn’t have any makeup with me, didn’t even have a brush to go through my hair. And then, all of a sudden, there’s Emily Maitlis, and she looks like a movie star.” Anderson hoots. Because she had been studying her for months, she (the actual movie star) went in for a hug. Which sounds, perhaps, like it was a mistake. “She was very sweet, but very boundaried. Very boundaried,” Anderson recalls.
In the research, Anderson started to notice similarities between her and Maitlis’s work. Specifically, she remembered trying to cry during an emotional scene in her 2000 film The House of Mirth, but they were shooting in a flight path, “and there was a fucking bumblebee in our faces!” There are so many “human scenarios” like this, Anderson says, when things don’t go to plan on a job, and in those moments “all the facts fly out of my head. But with the Emilys of the world, it incentivises and invigorates them – somehow the facts remain, and they have a sharper access to them because of the frisson that’s created in the moment.” She briefly marvels. “I identify with the pressure and expectation,” says Anderson, but, crucially, she always relies on a script. “How impressive, how daunting, the idea of being able to just go with whatever happens in front of you,” she says, in her liquid accent that slips from London to America within a single sentence. Did the character stay with her? “That feels a bit creepy, like taking ownership of something that is not mine. And also, you know, she’s had experience with stalkers – she doesn’t need another example of that from me.”
The only character,in fact, that has lingered in Anderson long after the work ended was Blanche DuBois. “With all the characters I’ve played, even Scully, who I played for the longest, it feels like there’s a sheath between me and them, whereas I feel like Blanche could come back in a split second.” This was the Young Vic’s 2014 production of A Streetcar Named Desire, when Anderson said she immersed herself so deeply she was hanging on to reality by a thread. Talking to the director after one show she had a vision of a train. “It’s not in heaven, but somewhere in another dimension, a train that has continuous cars that’s just going and going ad infinitum. And everybody who’s ever done a Tennessee Williams play is on that train. And once you do it, a part of you can never get off.”
She giggles a little nervously. “I’m getting very esoteric here but I do wonder, you know, when people talk about ‘the muse’ or connecting to something that is bigger than themselves, by immersing oneself into a Rothko or Brice Marden or a Tennessee Williams you somehow enter into this realm of understanding. There’s no coming back – it felt dangerous.” Your job sounds, I offer sensitively, a bit bonkers. “It’s totally bonkers! I thought about this recently, going to the Baftas and the Golden Globes” – to which, we should note, Anderson wore a dress embroidered all over with vulvas – “all of these artists who have put everything into the work: blood, sweat, tears, money. Put their families second to this singular vision and then… it doesn’t get nominated. I wish there was an award for effort. For even, actually, getting the thing made at all! Bonkers.”
She’s remembering The House of Mirth again, when “one particularly horrendous review about my performance almost made me quit acting. The mixture of that and the bland reception was a real eye opener for me, a rude awakening to the fickleness of the industry.” She pauses. “I don’t know what it is about you, but we always go so deep,” she says, so we talk instead, cheerily, about soft drinks.
Last year, after trying to wean herself off Coca-Cola, Anderson launched a “functional drink” called G Spot, and as well as learning about “adaptogens” and “nootropics”, she was surprised to learn about herself. What she learned was, she says with some majesty, “I too am ‘product’.” When colleagues started referring to “Brand Gillian”, taking into account not just the drink, pitched smartly as a kind of anti-wellness wellness product, but her new production company, too, she felt deeply uncomfortable. “At first I kept saying, can we not frame it differently, please? And then I started to realise, actually, that it makes sense to… embrace it.” She explains: “I’ve been in the industry 30 years, and have a significant fanbase that has become obsessed with various characters that I have played, whether that’s Scully or Stella [in The Fall], or Blanche, or Jean [in Sex Education]. There’s something that women are getting from them, and the alchemy of me being attached.”
For a while after The Fall, in which she played a ruthless, urbane cop, she heard about bumper stickers that said, “What would Stella do?” “That’s a form of empowerment, whether in imagining oneself as Stella in order to ask for the raise, or investigating oneself as an individual: what you want, what you want to put in your body, what you want out of your life, what you want from your job, what you want from your partner, what you want in bed… And feeling courageous enough to ask for it, too.”
She grins. “Choose not to do what everybody else is doing. Choose not to go to the gym today. Choose to eat the chocolate bar!” The more Anderson talks, the more it seems as though embracing Brand Gillian has been surprisingly therapeutic and energising for her, as though identifying what appeals about her to others has clarified who she wants to be. “I’m not a guru. It’s just about encouraging anyone who identifies as a woman to courageously embrace that part of them that knows ultimately, intuitively, what’s good for them. And be brave enough to say yes, or brave enough to say no.”
Has she always been that brave herself? “It took me a long time to do it in romantic relationships, but I could do it pretty much everywhere else.” How? “It’s come from circumstances in my life. It’s come from where I grew up, how I grew up. Being peripatetic, being a TV star at 20, having a child at 25. It’s all of it.”
While her “side hustles” are under a spotlight, Anderson’s private life is just as demanding. Though she prefers not to confirm the name of her partner, tabloids suggest she’s back together with her partner of four years, Peter Morgan, the screenwriter best known for The Crown. Her daughter is 29, and her sons, she tells me proudly, are “professional sportsmen. I mean, the youngest is 15, so it’s hard to call him a man but that is their life and their focus. Which means my life and their dad’s life” – ex-husband Mark Griffiths – “is filled with facilitating that dream for them. It involves a lot of driving and us, you know, doing whatever they tell us to do, basically.” The juxtaposition between the two halves of her life, one glamorous, the other frazzled and suburban, is oddly thrilling. “It’s exhilarating and terrifying,” she says of supporting her sons. “It’s emotional, too, trying to let them have their own journey, but not trying to fix things. They work hard.” She smiles a new kind of smile. “And they put me to shame.”
It is a particularly interesting time to interview Anderson, as “Brand Gillian”, she adds, “Is all about trying to answer every question as honestly as possible”. That can be dangerous too, though, can’t it? Authenticity has a price. “Yes I’ll get into trouble,” she smiles, “from time to time.” She has had to be slightly cautious recently when writing introductions to the chapters of a book she’s editing. The book came about after Anderson put a call out for women to share, anonymously, their sexual fantasies. This has been a gorgeous kink in her career, the pivot to sex: it happened after the popularity of her role as charismatic therapist Jean Milburn in Sex Education, and it has led to Anderson taking ownership of her former status as sex object, and turning the gaze outward, with humour and depth. “If I weren’t in the public eye, as I am, I’d be able to be much more frank when writing about how the fantasies relate to my own experience. And there have been versions of intros that I’ve done where I’ve shut myself down because I could see that Daily Mail headline, you know?”
Amid the 174 fantasies in the book is hidden one of her own. “We’ve found a balance of what feels genuine and true without the whole book becoming about me. Yes, I have identification, and hopefully many women reading it will have identification, too. But it’s about women collectively. It’s an exploration of our internal worlds,” she says, with precision. Has she found the editing process titillating? “It’s become more titillating in the edit. Being able to have one thing flow into another and poetry to be revealed in the process, it has become exciting and titillating and surprising and moving and beautiful.”
And it’s taught her two things. “That even though this is a fearless exploration, there are so many things that are still untouchable subjects, or too risky for big companies or individuals to embrace without consequence.” The second thing it has taught her: “I need to focus my mind. What’s the message? What’s the moral? What are you left with at the end of the day? What do women want? And – do they have to stay in fantasy? There’s a lot of yearning, for what women don’t have, or feel afraid to ask for.” Has it, then, felt like a political project? “You know, everything is politics, particularly when you steer into the subject of women.” The book, she adds, is called Want.
I am curious where Brand Gillian goes next, in terms of business, and to see where this self-reflection takes her. “Yes, it feels like a valid and intriguing, sometimes exciting, creative journey to be on.” She admits, after a pause, “I didn’t expect it to be. I’ve been in therapy for a good portion of my life. And so I thought all of the questions had been asked, or that I was fixed. But this is a different way of looking at things.” Her eyes widen, theatrically. “And, I guess, I’m along for the ride.”
Scoop is on Netflix from 5 April
Fashion editors Jo jones and Hope Lawrie; hair by James Rowe at Bryant Artists using Bumble and Bumble; makeup Amanda Grossman at The Only Agency using Dr Strum and Suqqu; fashion assistant Sam Deaman; photography assistants Claudia Gschwend, Tom Frimley and Tilly Pearson
Submitted by anonymous. Collected by gillian anderson
A collection of confessions from women around the world, Want is a revelatory, sensational and game-changing exploration of women’s sexuality that asks, and answers: How do women feel about sex when they have the freedom to be totally anonymous?
ONDON, ENGLAND – MARCH 05: Gillian Anderson (C) gives a toast at the NET-A-PORTER Incredible Women’s Dinner in partnership with De Beers at the Victoria & Albert Museum on March 5, 2024 in London, England. (Photo by Dave Benett/Getty Images for NET-A-PORTER)
‘The letters are extraordinary’ enthuses Gillian Anderson over Zoom from Marrakech, where she is enjoying a few days’ downtime after the BAFTAs. We’re talking about her new book, Want, a ‘contemporary version’ of Nancy Friday’s genre-defining 1973 book about female desire, My Secret Garden: Women’s Sexual Fantasies. Featuring 174 anonymous letters addressed to Anderson, Want will be published later this year. (She’s previously co-authored a science fiction trilogy and a non-fiction manifesto for young women.) ‘They are just a tiny cross-section [of the thousands of letters] we received from all over the world.’ It’s painful culling so many heartfelt missives, she admits, but, ‘I want women to be able to carry it around in their handbag and get it out on the train.’
Want isn’t Anderson’s only endeavour of late: last year, she co-launched G Spot, a sparkling low-sugar soft drink that comes in four flavours, or rather themes – Soothe, Lift, Protect and Arouse – containing adaptogens (which reduce stress) and nootropics (which enhance cognitive function). At the time, Anderson, teetotal for the last two decades, was trying to wean herself off Coca Cola and finding ‘everything I tried was not doing the trick’. She’s thrilled with the result, which is ‘incredibly tasty. And they do what they say on the tin – they give you a really good boost. My team – which is 10 people! A lot of people! Suddenly, out of nowhere’ are producing G Spot ‘in small batches’ and it’s ‘selling out and selling out’, she says, pleased.
Did she plan this kink in her career path or was it organic? ‘It certainly wasn’t a space I’d been dreaming about,’ she laughs. ‘Organic is a good word for it. So much of it stems from Jean Milburn.’ Ahhh, Jean Milburn: Anderson’s stonkingly intelligent, charismatic and self-sufficient sex therapist in cult show Sex Education. There’s something so pleasing about Anderson taking this role – and this kink in her career path – when she was about to turn 50 (she is now 55) at a time when we’ve been led to believe women should be slowing down, not ramping up.
Anderson’s latest project is upcoming movie Scoop, an adaptation of former Newsnight producer Sam McAlister’s memoir, specifically the part where she writes about securing that Prince Andrew interview in 2019. ‘We all know the story,’ says Anderson. But it’s still ‘so propulsive. When the interview suddenly started, I gasped. Which is crazy, because I was there [filming it].’
Anderson is excellent as the wry, watchful Newsnight anchor Emily Maitlis – iconic bob perfectly coiffed, ever-present Biro in one hand – but she was initially unsure about the part. She loved Peter Moffat’s script (‘everything’) and the director Philip Martin (whose credits include The Crown and Birdsong), but ‘there were so many things to get wrong. Emily is so formidable and she’s still alive. When I told them my fears, they said, “That’s exactly why you should do it.”’ Her response was simply, ‘Fuuuuuuck.’ But she was in.
The film leans into the mythology around Maitlis – one of Britain’s most esteemed broadcasters. ‘Nobody has ever seen her eat, she’s superwoman,’ quips one producer in Scoop. ‘She was placed on a pedestal, to a degree,’ agrees Anderson, ‘a pedestal I think she deserved to be placed on – and you get a sense of that from how they talk about her. She’s their secret weapon, right? That interview is bloody serious. Emily is there for one reason and one reason only. She is going to do everything in her power to make sure the hard questions are asked… the questions everybody else has been scared to ask.’
Maitlis declined to meet Anderson because she is working on her own project about the interview, but, to get into the role, Anderson listened to The News Agents podcast, which Maitlis co-presents with Jon Sopel and Lewis Goodall, watched hours of Newsnight and pored over Maitlis’s autobiography, Airhead.
Maitlis is the latest in Anderson’s roster of female characters for whom the adage ‘still waters run deep’ was invented, including FBI agent Dana Scully in The X-Files, DSI Stella Gibson in The Fall and Jean Milburn. Each character has its own era, with its own cult fans. (In-between are plenty more epochal women, including Blanche DuBois, Miss Havisham and Margaret Thatcher.)
‘I feel I’ve been incredibly lucky [with these roles]. I could say that I am very specific about choices, but I’ve also done things that haven’t seen the light of day,’ she laughs. ‘I also think, early on in my career, I learned that where I feel like I’m doing important work is when I’m taking risks. There have been so many times when I’ve jumped into something and I’m terrified but I know I’ll be OK because of the last time I jumped into something scary. Whether it’s Blanche, Thatcher or Maitlis. And Scully, which I signed up to when I was 24.’
That was more than three decades ago now, but Scully remains her most famous role. ‘It will never leave me,’ she says, without rancour. ‘There are some die-hard fans who have followed me from X-Files who will watch everything [I do].’ And now it’s reaching an entirely new audience, as part of Gen Z’s throwback TV project, which sees them mainlining ’90s classics. ‘At the BAFTAs I was talking to Samantha Morton’s daughter, who’s in her early twenties, and she just wanted to talk about The X-Files… [The fans span] late teens to octogenarians,’ she marvels.
Like Maitlis, Anderson herself is frequently described as formidable, but she’s warm, relaxed and thoughtful company. At times, I’d go so far to say she twinkles, as much as one can twinkle on Zoom. Her Instagram profile reflects an impish sense of humour, with a bio that reads ‘shag specialist’ and a proclivity for a ‘penis’ or ‘yoni of the day’. (Again, stemming from Jean Milburn.)
But the final season of Sex Education marked something of a gear change for the sensual Jean. Having thought she was perimenopausal in season three, she discovers, at almost 50, that she is, in fact, pregnant. Rather than elegantly breezing through it like she does everything else, Anderson thought it was ‘so important’ to play Jean – with bird’s-nest hair and cabbage leaves in her bra – as a second-time mother struggling with matrescence. This reflects Anderson’s own experience of new motherhood. ‘I didn’t know what the fuck I was doing!’ she cries. ‘You’re upside down and you feel, sometimes, like you’re slightly going mad. And [unlike Jean] I had help.’
After her daughter Piper was born in 1994, Anderson was back on set of the second series of The X-Files almost immediately. ‘Ten days,’ she clarifies. ‘Ten days after a C-section.’ I know it was the ’90s, I say, but bloody hell. How did she feel? ‘I wouldn’t have chosen that, had I had the choice,’ she emphasises, raising her eyebrows. Anderson was 26 and ‘at the time, I was like, “Why is everybody making such a big deal about it?’’ Now, she gets it. ‘I got pregnant in the first series of a show that was becoming a massive hit.’
‘[After] the second one, I didn’t work for over a year. It took over a year before I felt like I was “in” my body.’ Her two sons, who she co-parents with her ex-partner, businessman Mark Griffiths, are 15 and 17. ‘I do every other week – the cooking and the picking up from school and all of that. But when they were younger I. Had. Help,’ she says, emphasising every word like she’s banging a drum. ‘I had help and I still struggled.’ Women who raise children on their own are ‘superwomen’ she says simply. ‘Women. Are. Amazing,’ she concludes. And with eyes twinkling, she logs off.
LONDON, ENGLAND – FEBRUARY 18: Gillian Anderson presents the Supporting Actor Award on stage during the EE BAFTA Film Awards 2024 at The Royal Festival Hall on February 18, 2024 in London, England. (Photo by Kate Green/BAFTA/Getty Images for BAFTA)
Gillian Anderson To Star In Lionsgate’s ‘White Bird: A Wonder Story’, Czech Shoot To Begin This Month
EXCLUSIVE: Fresh off her Golden Globe and SAG nominations for The Crown, we can reveal that Gillian Anderson is next to star in Lionsgate and director Marc Forster’s White Bird: A Wonder Story, which will begin production in the Czech Republic later this month.
White Bird: A Wonder Story is the creative companion movie drawn from the universe of the Lionsgate’s 2017 box office hit Wonder, which made more than $300M global.
The film charts the story of a young Jewish girl hidden away by a boy and his family in Nazi-occupied France during World War II. Anderson will play Vivienne, the woman who along with her family must make unimaginable choices. Additional casting has yet to be revealed.
The screenplay adaptation of R.J. Palacio’s graphic novel is by Mark Bomback (War For The Planet of the Apes). Forster (World War Z) returns to the studio where he directed the Oscar-winning Monster’s Ball 19 years ago.
Mandeville Films’ David Hoberman and Todd Lieberman, who produced Wonder, are also producing the new film, along with Palacio. Renée Wolfe, who is a partner in Forster’s 2DUX2, is executive-producing. Alex Young is executive-producing for Mandeville.Czech Republic, which hosts Amazon’s Carnival Row and multiple movie blockbusters, continues to be an in-demand European filming destination. Also due to shoot in the country this spring is Starz’s Dangerous Liaisons prequel series.
Anderson scored raves for her portrayal of Margaret Thatcher in Netflix smash The Crown. She previously won the Golden Globe and the Emmy Award for The X Files. She also currently stars in the Netflix’s Sex Education, which returns for a third season this year.
The actress is represented by Independent Talent Group and UTA.
LONDON, ENGLAND – DECEMBER 04: Gillian Anderson attends The Fashion Awards 2023 presented by Pandora at the Royal Albert Hall on December 04, 2023 in London, England.
@GillianA returns to the stage to read writer Katherine Mansfield’s joyful 1919 letter to her friend, the painter Anne Estelle Rice, who was heavily pregnant with twins.
The screenplay is from Rebecca Lenkiewicz and is based on Raynor Winn’s best-selling memoir, which recounts the true story of husband and wife, Raynor and Moth Winn’s 630-mile trek along the Cornwall, Devon and Dorset coastline.
On learning that Moth is terminally ill, and after being forcibly removed from their home, they make the desperate decision to keep walking in the hope that, in nature, they will find solace and a sense of acceptance.
gilliana
Did I tell you how excited I am to be working with these amazing women – Liz Karlsen, Marianne Elliott, Andi Coldwell, Helene Louvart – on an amazing script by Rebecca Lenkiewicz of an amazing book by Raynor Winn?! #thesaltpath
Gillian Anderson didn’t need much convincing to star in gothic mystery The Pale Blue Eye, the latest film from acclaimed director Scott Cooper, which follows weary detective Augustus Landor (Christian Bale) as he teams up with a young Edgar Allan Poe (Harry Melling) to investigate a grisly series of murders. A self confessed murder mystery fan, the project had all the elements Anderson enjoys, as she told The Lowdown: “It’s always good if it starts with death! I’m quite addicted to true crime as I find it very soothing – I like gruesome details and if it really happened, that’s even better. If there’s blood, body dismemberment, and gore, I’m there!”
…
Her mother Julia couldn’t be more different. Defying the era’s gender norms, Julia enjoys openly flirting, is prone to loud outbursts, and never keeps her often controversial opinions to herself. Anderson tells us she couldn’t wait to play such an openly outrageous character:“Well, she’s not that different from how I am most of the time in my life, so it was quite easy to step into her shoes! Every director is different in terms of how far they will allow you to take things to extremes – they either pull you back in the moment or they will cut the scene entirelyso you aren’t there anymore. Scott was really interested in me exploring as much as possible and having fun with it. So, I could properly explore the boundaries of mental health and how that tied in with what we might term as ‘eccentricities’. It was fun!” Despite Julia’s openness, she still has her secrets – as doesevery character in The Pale Blue Eye….
… Having starred in a great murder mystery, I was curious whether the cast now felt they could potentially become successful detectives themselves. and Anderson telling me her clumsiness would get in the way – “I’d tread all over the evidence going ‘oh no, I’ve squashed it’.”
GILLIAN ANDERSON LAUNCHES HER FIRST AUDIO SHOW TITLED ‘WHAT DO I KNOW?!’
Introducing: Gillian Anderson exclusively on Curio. Over the coming weeks, we’ll be listening to a series of curated audio articles, exploring a range of deeply human stories of social challenges, sexual liberation, phenomenal women and much more. Join us every other Thursday for new episodes as we go on a collective journey of discovery, asking ourselves to truly question, ‘What do I know?!”
GILLIAN ANDERSON LAUNCHES HER FIRST AUDIO SHOW TITLED ‘WHAT DO I KNOW?!’
The new show encourages listeners to take ‘the time to listen and reflect on inspiring and surprising stories’
Gillian Anderson has launched an audio show that will explore stories about people through a “personally curated selection of narrated articles”.
The show is titled “What Do I Know?!” and episodes will be released on a fortnightly basis on the audio journalism app Curio.
Anderson, 53, will guide listeners through a range of stories, covering topics from social challenges to sexual liberation, to phenomenal women and more.
The X-Files star said she was “thrilled” about the show and added in a statement about her partnership with Curio: “By taking the time to listen and reflect on inspiring and surprising stories, we can open our minds to new perspectives and points-of-view and develop greater understanding and empathy. I hope you’ll enjoy listening and learning alongside me.”
The first episode of “What Do I Know?!”, which was released today, Monday 21 February, is about the late Nobel Prize winner Rita Levi-Montalcini.
Levi-Montalcini was an Italian neurobiologist who was awarded the 1986 Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine jointly with her colleague, Stanley Cohen, for the discovery of nerve growth factor.
She was the third woman to receive the Prize, which was only awarded to her and Cohen more than a decade after their work was published. Later, in 2009, she became the first Nobel laureate to reach the age of 100 and at the time of her death in 2012, she was the oldest living Nobel laureate.
Throughout the episode, Anderson will explore Levi-Montalcini and speak about pioneering women in history who were overlooked.
Govind Balakrishnan, CEO and co-founder of Curio, said the show aims to “bring great journalism to life, to provide a catalyst for conversations of different perspectives and encourage inclusive thinking”.
“We live in a world where we have access to an abundance of information, whether that’s from the news, social media or podcasts, and sometimes that can feel overwhelming or like it is pushing us in a certain direction,” he added.
“At Curio we believe there is a need to reconnect with each other and to use journalism as a way to inspire us to challenge our worldviews and in turn drive self-improvement.”
Few people can say their comfort zone is in playing strong women, but for Gillian Anderson, it ‘s become something of a personal brand.
The American-British actor, who was once best-known for her skeptical FBI agent Dana Scully in Fox’s long-running sci-fi hit “The X-Files,” has gone on to play detective Stella Gibson in “The Fall,” notorious British prime minister Margaret Thatcher in “The Crown” and sex therapist Jean Milburn in “Sex Education.” (And you wouldn’t want to cross any of them.)
Anderson — who will receive the Variety Icon Award in a ceremony at CannesSeries on April 1 — will next be seen portraying the rarely dramatized Eleanor Roosevelt, opposite Viola Davis’ Michelle Obama and Michelle Pfeiffer’s Betty Ford, in Showtime’s drama “The First Lady.”
But portraying no-nonsense women didn’t begin as a conscious choice for Anderson. In 1993, she recognized a “stark difference” between the Dana Scully role and “pretty much everything else on television at the time,” though, at age 24, she wouldn’t have labelled Scully as the feminist icon she’d come to represent.
“I don’t think it was as clear-cut in my mind as being, ‘Oh, this is a feminist character,’” she says. “I think that it was more of just, ‘This is a woman that I haven’t seen before on television, and she’s so unique.’”
Yet Anderson describes a “knee-jerk reaction” to the sexist behaviors that were prevalent within the world of the show. “I was expected to walk behind [co-star David Duchovny] when [our characters] walked up to the front doors of the people we were investigating,” she says. “There were things that I rebelled against.”
After ” The X-Files” wrapped Season 9 in 2002, Anderson returned for a 2008 movie and two more seasons in 2016 and 2018, but closed the door for good soon after. Four years on, with the Chris Carter-helmed show finding new generations of fans on Hulu and Star internationally — not to mention the drive among studios to reboot tried and tested properties for the Wild West of streaming — could she be lured back again?
“It just feels like such an old idea,” says Anderson. “I’ve done it, I did it for so many years, and it also ended on such an unfortunate note.”
The actor is referencing (spoiler alert) Scully’s bizarre pregnancy reveal in the Season 11 finale — a move by the show’s writers that was anathema to X-philes who felt their cool-girl detective deserved a more empowering send-off.
“In order to even begin to have that conversation [about another season] there would need to be a whole new set of writers and the baton would need to be handed on for it to feel like it was new and progressive. So yeah, it’s very much in the past.”
Anderson had no interest in doing another TV series in 2012 when she was offered “The Fall,” an unsettling BBC crime drama in which she’d play another law enforcement official, this time hunting down Jamie Dornan’s depraved serial killer Paul Spector.
“There was something so completely different about [Stella] than Scully, and she felt like such a modern woman to me,” says Anderson. Despite initial reservations, she accepted the role “because of how good and spare and mature the writing was by Allan Cubitt. That really drew me and I felt once again that I hadn’t really seen a character like her before.”
Since first teasing a potential return of ” The Fall” during a Variety “Actors on Actors” conversation in 2021, Anderson says development on another season of the show is indeed underway. As Spector committed suicide in the Season 3 finale, the storyline will continue with Stella likely tackling a new case.
“Dare I say it’s something in the works,” Anderson says coyly. “I don’t know how many episodes we would do, but it’s certainly something that’s bubbling.”
As to whether the BBC and Netflix, which helped to finance and popularize the show among global audiences, will again be partners on the new season, Anderson hesitates. “Not necessarily,” she says smiling.
Anderson, who is highly complimentary of Netflix, appeared in another of the streamer’s shows: Season 4 of “The Crown.” She memorably plays an uncompromising Thatcher sparring with Olivia Colman’s Queen Elizabeth II, and earned an supporting actress Emmy last year.
She takes on yet another historical figure in Showtime’s “The First Lady,” though this time, it’s someone whom few have living memories of. Eleanor Roosevelt was married to President Franklin D. Roosevelt, who was paralyzed from the waist down at age 39 and eventually used a wheelchair. As he served four terms in office, Eleanor Roosevelt served as first lady from 1933 through to 1945.
“She was unbelievably prolific in her good works, whether those good works were her civil rights works or for the underprivileged or soldiers, or the articles or the books that she wrote, or the radio shows that she did — whatever she set her mind to,” says Anderson.
But much like Thatcher, for whom Anderson assumed a quivering deep and throaty tone, the role was a physical one that required a great deal of voice work. “She had a very, very specific voice — a very specific accent and pitch,” says Anderson, who naturally has a deeper voice.
“She had a very, very high voice and I had to make some decisions early on to not turn away too many audience members with too high of an interpretation of what she was doing and find some kind of a middle ground with it.”
The team also worked hard, says Anderson, to edge her shorter frame toward Roosevelt’s tall physicality, “without it feeling too comical.”
It’s difficult to imagine Anderson being anything but composed. She’s almost unnervingly collected, thoughtful and articulate. Certainly, it’s not a massive leap between her calm demeanor and the unruffled characters she tends to play on screen.
When she has been cast in comedies, she’s always ended up playing “the straight man,” Anderson admits, “rather than the one who actually gets to crack a joke.” Her personal humor veers more into the “Curb Your Enthusiasm” camp, she explains.
That’s why taking on the audacious Jean Milburn on Netflix’s “Sex Education,” which is soon heading into Season 4, has been so liberating. “I think for a lot of people, it does feel like it’s a new idea: Me being cast as a comedian,” says Anderson.
“The minute I picked up the scripts and started reading, I couldn’t put them down,” she says. “I’m incredibly grateful to be a part of that show. I feel like I only really got the importance of it culturally in this moment in time, after it started to air.”
In Britain, “Sex Education” received its share of criticism for its American stylings in a U.K. setting, but Anderson points out that “the diehard audiences eat all of that up.”
“And that’s precisely why they seem to get it more: Because it’s no time, no place. It’s its own special world of …” after a long pause, she giggles and needs cajoling to finish her sentence.
“Fluids,” she declares finally. “In all of its meanings.”
After receiving critical acclaim for her role as Margaret Thatcher in The Crown, the iconic actor talks to Ryan Cahill about one of the most successful years of her career, and what comes next…
The star at the forefront of the past decade of entertainment discusses playing Margaret Thatcher on The Crown and sex therapist Jean Milburn on Sex Education.
BY KRISTA SMITH
Consider it a testament to Gillian Anderson’s power that she can inhabit our collective cultural imagination as the outspoken sex therapist Jean Milburn on Sex Education and, at the same time, give a showstopping performance as conservative icon Margaret Thatcher in The Crown Season 4. “It feels like a really good moment,” says Anderson of her current creative circumstances. “It feels like stuff is coming to me in a different way, a different capacity — some very interesting material and really interesting characters. It feels like the right time for it, and it is odd when that happens in one’s 50s. I’m trying to savor it as much as possible.” Anderson entered the spotlight at age 24, when she landed her career-making role as F.B.I. agent Dana Scully on The X-Files. The show earned her an Emmy, a Golden Globe, and two SAG Awards for Best Actress — accolades that accompanied an overwhelming response from a die-hard fanbase. Her performance broke new ground for women in television, and Anderson fought hard for equal pay with her co-star David Duchovny. (Point of interest: There’s evidence — anecdotal and scientific — that her character has inspired women to pursue careers in STEM fields, a phenomenon known as the Scully Effect.) Over the years, Anderson has delivered a series of striking performances onstage and onscreen. There’s her leading turn in the 2000 adaptation of Edith Wharton’s The House of Mirth, her Emmy-nominated work in the BBC miniseries Bleak House, and her chillingly glamorous portrayal of Detective Superintendent Stella Gibson in the Northern Irish crime drama The Fall. That’s in addition to starring roles in productions of A Doll’s House, A Streetcar Named Desire, and All About Eve, each of which garnered her a Laurence Olivier Award nomination. The actor, a bold feminist from the early days of her career, also maintains a hilariously naughty Instagram account. Broadcasting to her 1.8 million followers, Anderson celebrates, among other things, the genitalia-themed imagery that Sex Education fans send her way. “Most of the time it’s people who send stuff to me, and I will repost it and draw attention to it with a quip of some kind,” she says. Margaret Thatcher would definitely not approve.
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All About Gillian 