Gillian Anderson has been a British national treasure for many years. This may seem incongruous to state definitively of a Chicago-born actress who first rose to prominence playing an FBI agent on a hit network show, but it is what it is. The year The X-Files ended, Anderson moved to London, and she has lived there ever since. She had spent her earliest childhood years in the city. Sorry America, it doesn’t matter what her passport says: at this point, Anderson has lived as much of her life in the UK as outside it, and the country is very keen to claim her.
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Anderson’s Anglophilia runs deep, you see, and more than perhaps any other American acting transplant, she has earned her stripes. With the financial freedom The X-Files offered, she was called back to London to tread the boards, and from her earliest appearances on the West End stage she wowed audiences and critics alike, and earned three Olivier Award nominations. She quickly became British cinema’s best friend, starring in a string of independent productions. On TV, she has played Miss Havisham, Margaret Thatcher and, now, Emily Maitlis; three more culturally definitive Brits you could not find. And, oh yes, she was awarded an honorary OBE by the Queen in 2016.
It’s relevant, because Emily Maitlis — though she was born in Canada (to British parents) — is a popular figure in the UK, and it is that role we are meeting to discuss today. Havisham is fictional and Thatcher is, to say the least, divisive, but Maitlis is well-respected. And it’s because Anderson is so culturally British at this point that she nearly ran from the suggestion of playing her. “What would I be subjected to?” she wondered.
American and British television news is so foundationally different that it is hard to find an analog for Emily Maitlis. CNN’s Christiane Amanpour — who is British-Iranian herself — is probably as close as Americans might come to understanding Maitlis’s power and prestige in Britain. As a host of the BBC’s news output, and then a main presenter on its flagship current affairs show Newsnight, she had become one of the most celebrated newsreaders and journalists in the country when, in 2019, she sat for an interview with Prince Andrew, the Duke of York.
The story of that interview is told in Netflix’s Scoop, which stars Anderson as Maitlis and details how an expected easy ride from the nation’s premier broadcaster to discuss the prince’s charity work became appointment viewing when it came to light that Andrew, a senior member of the British Royal Family, had continued a friendship with the disgraced financier Jeffrey Epstein years after he was convicted of child prostitution. Maitlis’ interview with Andrew Windsor was one of the most sensational royal exclusives to date, as Andrew’s bizarre responses to the questions put to him only further sealed his fate. A few months after the interview aired, Andrew indefinitely withdrew from his public roles.
“Was I asking for trouble?” Anderson says she asked herself. “Does doing it cause too much controversy? I admire her, she’s still alive, she’s in the same neighborhood. More than anything, was it a fair portrayal? This was someone else’s experience and I wasn’t interested in any dirt or drama.”
Anderson is a podcast fiend, which only further complicated the decision, because Maitlis’ The News Agents, which she co-hosts with Jon Sopel and Lewis Goodall, is one of her go-tos. “It’s part of how I relax,” she laughs. True crime is another favorite; days after we speak, Anderson will send recommendations for West Cork and Monster: DC Sniper. “On the one hand, there’s a part of me that begrudges the fact that I feel the need to have a constant stream of information always going into my ear. But at the same time, I do like to learn, and I feel like it’s not wasted time if I’m learning things.”
This made tackling Emily Maitlis different from playing Margaret Thatcher in The Crown, though Anderson acknowledges too that she was nervous it would look like she was choosing to only play real people. “I do seem to be doing that over and over again,” she notes. In the case of Thatcher, “I didn’t know much about her at all. I certainly didn’t know anything about her history or her childhood.” Maitlis felt a lot closer.
Ultimately, the script for Scoop, by Peter Moffat and Geoff Bussetil, persuaded Anderson there was a story to tell, and one that could be done justice. “Interrogating the script, it felt like the way she was presented was not controversial,” Anderson says. “She comes across well. I think it’s the perfect example of what makes her so good as a journalist, that she’s able to be spontaneous in the interview, and react to what he’s saying. You have to think on your feet and not be thrown, and for me, what happens in situations where there’s pressure or stress is that I’m more likely to say stupid things. For my brain to go blank, or to scare someone away by being too keen. All of the things that Emily doesn’t do. It’s the talent that sets good journalists apart, I think, and you see that.”
Anderson dove into the research, reading the book by Sam McAlister, the former Newsnight producer who had secured the interview with Andrew, on which Scoop is based; Billie Piper plays McAlister in the film. She also read Airhead, Maitlis’ own account of her career and the interview, and came to understand the pressure she feels Maitlis put on herself to get the interview right. Maitlis had earlier interviewed Bill Clinton, who some felt ran rings around her, so the stakes were high.
“One of the things that has come up from journalists who have interviewed me about this is that they said they appreciated seeing the nervousness in her, as she looks in the mirror before the interview,” says Anderson. “I don’t know if she really addresses that in her own book, but she’s human, and you’d expect that to be there. I used to be married to a war correspondent, I know of that adrenaline. I know the chasing of that feeling. I don’t know, but it seemed like part of her comes alive in that moment. Is it excitement, is it fear?”
Scoop deftly deals with the suggestion that it might also be the weight of expectation. Anderson dismisses the idea that what she does for a living can be adequately compared, but she also acknowledges that she remains terrified in the moments before she steps out onto a stage. “I’ve had panic attacks,” she says. “On stage, in interviews. On film or television, I always think I’m going to be fired for the first day or two. I can sense the directors and producers huddling behind the monitors, having conversations about the fact that I suck, and why did they hire me?”
She remembers working on The Fall, a dialogue-heavy project for which she received many plaudits. She had been exhausted working on multiple projects, traveling back and forth between countries, and struggled to remember the script. “The lines wouldn’t stay in my head,” she says, “and because they wouldn’t stay in my head, and because I was too exhausted, I started to panic. And when I panicked, they really wouldn’t stay in my head. It was devastating.”
She wonders if Emily Maitlis walked away from the Andrew interview satisfied that she had achieved what she set out to achieve. “There were things that remained unanswered. There are still question marks. I don’t know if she walked away thinking, ‘If only I’d…’”
Anderson has grappled for her entire career with the contradictions that lie between her own feelings about her work and the praise and success she has received from others. She remembers seeing a work by the artist Robert Longo; a charcoal based on an X-ray of a painting by Manet. “On the surface, you recognize the Manet, but then he’s also got the underpainting, and all the attempts to get the final image right,” says Anderson. “It was like a physical manifestation of any creative process, trial and error manifest. It was really startling.”
She has gotten better at allowing herself to be fallible; to be open to the possibility that the messy work that goes in gets lost behind the resulting artwork. In recent years, she has launched a soft drink brand aimed at women called G Spot; as part of the messaging around the brand, she has engaged in many conversations with women about the damaging effects of low self-esteem and the relentless quest for perfection. “Part of what we’re investigating is the degree to which women struggle to ask for what they actually want,” she explains.
It is a conversation she has struggled to have with herself for many years. Creating the drink, she says, has been immensely helpful in helping her parse the way she was treated by the culture — and by network executives — while she was first coming up in The X-Files. She was 24 when she auditioned for the show, and within a few years she was the hottest star on television. “So young!” she marvels. “Press every weekend. Interview, interview, photo shoot, photo shoot. Everywhere I went, there would be paparazzi. I felt trapped, so I’d sit across from a journalist and project trapped.”
In the media world of the 1990s, she was pushed into becoming a pin-up on teenage boys’ bedroom walls while at the same time, behind the scenes, she was fighting for her paycheck on the show to match her co-star David Duchovny’s. She had her first child during the early run of the show, returning to work just 10 days after having a C-section, and was still fighting for equal pay when The X-Files had become such a phenomenon that it spun off into feature films. ‘The Scully Effect’ encouraged a generation of girls to take up science, but the actress playing Scully spent the show’s run defending her right to be there, and rather than embrace the many questions she got about her struggle, she was thrown by them. “Why do the press want to talk about the pay disparity?” she thought. “Why are they bringing all of this up again?”
Anderson simply didn’t consider these fights to be any sign of courage, because she couldn’t admit to herself that she had any; the world was telling her she didn’t deserve it. “I didn’t want to talk about any of it,” she says. “But actually, now I’m like, ‘I’m going to join you in talking about it because it’s still an issue.’ That was proved to me when I did a reboot of The X-Files and they were still trying to do the same motherf*cking thing again, so many years later.”
Doing Sex Education also helped her reshape her own narrative. The sex-positive show for teens has been quietly transgressive in making it OK to talk about topics we have always considered taboo. She liked the script — and liked the part she had been offered — but even she was surprised by how much enlightenment she found in the work as she interrogated her own past.
“The irony is I’ve only started to think consciously about it in the past two years,” she says. “I can understand, with my business hat on, why I was the person hired for Scully. And I can also understand, with my business hat on, how I became the person you might come to for Stella Gibson [in The Fall] or Jean Milburn [in Sex Education]. But I’m not sure if I ever understood or took ownership for what the trajectory was between them.”
Like a true (honorary) Brit, Anderson doesn’t take praise very well. “I’m a bloody private person,” she says, “and a bit of a hermit. If you asked me, I’d rather be at home.” But she reluctantly admits now that she must “take ownership of the fact that I’ve got experience in this area. Maybe I just need to go a little bit out of my comfort zone to talk about that experience, because it encourages people — particularly women — to have the courage to ask for what they feel they deserve.”
Then, she says, there is another point she wants to make very urgently. She is pensive, struggling to find the words, and our time is running out. She will write it down, she promises. A few days later, she emails: “I wanted to make it clear that, because I don’t have it cracked when people respond and say, ‘When you played such-and-such character, or when you asked for equal pay, or spoke up, we were inspired,’ on the days when I question whether I’m up to a challenge, or I struggle to put one foot in front of the other, it’s inspiring to me too!
“Hearing from fans that what I’m doing is inspiring to them, that obviously gives me the strength and motivation to keep going because it feels like there’s a bigger purpose outside of me just living my life. And so, right now I’m starting to embrace it and engage more in the dialogue between what I want from life, and what the people who have supported me for decades want from me as I live my life. It is the first time it feels like more of a dialogue than a monologue. Hey, I may not be suited to it, and I might slip back into my cave, but for now I’ve poked my head out and am exploring.”
Our time together at an end, Anderson is on to another meeting, perhaps accompanied in the car by one of her gruesome podcast favorites. A few nights ago, she remembers returning home at 11 p.m. ready to unwind with some light dismemberment. “If someone recommends a crime podcast to me, I’ll throw it on for a few minutes while I’m having some grapes or whatever; a little snack.”
She turned to the family’s Spotify app, which she doesn’t often use, and hit play. After a few seconds, the podcast switched to a mindfulness exercise; plinky-planky meditative music and all. So, she switched it back — death, destruction, misery — and a few seconds later, it happened again — release your inner self. “It was like some ghost in the machine,” she says.
Anderson persisted, but the podcast kept switching over. She started to wonder if it was a sign from a concerned higher power, that perhaps she had better unwind with something lighter. Then she got a text from her 15-year-old son. “He says, ‘Mum, are you trying to listen to a crime podcast?’” He had been at his dad’s house, using the same shared Spotify account.
“Like, shouldn’t it be the other way around?” laughs Anderson. “What a perfect example of how sane and healthy my kids are, and how slightly disturbed I am.”