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Sharply tailored blazers and trousers were a signature look for the actor during her portrayal of FBI agent Dana Scully in the seminal sci-fi series (and its spin-off movies), The X-Files. Though Anderson recalls the era and her sartorial choices with less significance. “I think that if I’m honest, in the 90s, I don’t know what the hell I was doing,” the 57-year-old tells Stellar, speaking from Paris. “And if you look at what I wore in the 90s, you might change that sentence,” she says, when Stellar puts to her that she is a muse of a decade, which has famously found its way into present-day style. “I feel like I only really started paying attention to fashion and the art of fashion and really kind of woke up to embrace the beauty of that art history maybe 15 years ago,” Anderson adds, almost questioning herself. “So I think that I’ve made a particular point of embracing it and having fun with it. “I work with a stylist on a regular basis now,” she notes. “We have fun choosing [outfits]. I feel like what changed is that I sort of pay attention and it matters to me more.” And it shows. Wearing head-to-toe Jacquemus, Anderson sat front row at the French luxury house’s recent Paris Fashion Week show at Chateau de Versailles. In contrast to those The X-Files power suits, Anderson wore a floor-length maxi dress with a funnel neckline, teamed with oversized sunglasses and a red clutch. The result? It was much more her: a fashion representation of Anderson’s four-decade long Hollywood career – sleek, cool and a bit unexpected. It was also in Paris where Anderson walked the runway at L’Oréal Paris’ annual Le Défilé show, held at Hotel de Ville. “I think it’s important, particularly for younger women, to witness women of all ages … owning it,” Anderson – an ambassador for L’Oreal Paris – says, of the show’s runway cast including Jane Fonda, Helen Mirren and supermodels Kendall Jenner and Cara Delevingne. Of the influence Anderson’s roles have had on her, Anderson says: “[The characters] felt like saying yes to a courageous kind of leap of faith, in a way. “So I guess they taught me that I can do hard things so I try and continue to do hard things. “And show myself that I can and not die.” ‘I SHIED AWAY FROM BEING A ROLE MODEL’ Anderson’s career has been defined by playing strong, powerful women. Yes, Scully is perhaps her most famous incarnation, but more recently she portrayed late British prime minister Margaret Thatcher in The Crown (the role won her an Emmy for Outstanding Supporting Actress in 2021) and sex therapist Jean Milburn in hit series Sex Education. Next month, she joins Lena Headey to play matriarchs of two opposing families in the new Netflix Western series, The Abandons. And on the big screen, she starred in AI blockbuster Tron: Ares, alongside Jared Leto and Greta Lee, last month. Asked how she feels about being a feminist role model, Anderson reflects: “In the beginning of my career, even though I was playing strong, empowered characters, I didn’t really lean into the bigger conversation around that [feminism]”. “I shied away a bit from really embracing a role as a role model. “I think what’s changed is that the older I’ve got, the more press I’ve done around talking about these characters. “Particularly, I remember, after Stella Gibson [her character in TV crime drama, The Fall] a lot of the journalists, in particular the women, were wanting to talk to me about her strengths and her as a feminist. “I felt like that time was almost my training wheels and since then, and particularly while I’d been working on the book [Want] and reading the letters from the women who contributed … and also playing characters like Jean Milburn [in Sex Education], I’ve started to embrace that conversation more in a way that I really hadn’t before.” The book Anderson is referring to is Want, her racy anthology of anonymous essays about female sexual empowerment, which was partly inspired by Nancy Friday’s 1973 cult compilation My Secret Garden: Women’s Sexual Fantasies. She’s now working on a follow-up, which she says will be “even more daring”; her call for submissions said, “I want to hear it all.” As she notes, “[Sex] still seems to be a topic of conversation that we, as women, need to continue to have. “Particularly as some of the narratives seem to be moving backwards. “There seem to be more and more efforts in certain areas of the world to quiet our voices in a time when I think the expectation was that it would be the opposite: that we’d be only moving forward. “And so, as long as it feels like in some areas that we’re moving backwards, it’s important to keep the conversation alive and well.” Read the full interview with Gillian Anderson in a new issue of Stellar, in the Sunday papers. For more from Stellar, click here.
