In 1998, when Gillian Anderson posed for the cover of the now defunct feminist magazine Jane, she had already been voted “the sexiest woman alive” by FHM readers. She had also recently won a Golden Globe and two Screen Actors Guild Awards for her role as FBI special agent Dana Scully in The X-Files.
That day of the shoot, all she could think about was how fat she felt: “Much of my youth, at a time when I could—should—have been as happy as one could imagine,” was spent obsessing over my flaws.
The actress recounted her experience in Calgary, where she is filming a period western: The Abandons, for Netflix: “I know from experience that when you’re frozen in shame, it’s very difficult to feel pleasure,” she added.
After decades of working to overcome his self-loathing, TOAnderson, 56, wants to help prevent other people from feeling the pressure to meet expectations cultural norms about a woman’s appearance, thoughts, and behavior. Especially in sex.
Even the sexiest person in the world can feel unsexy if they are self-conscious or embarrassed.she said. She is convinced that the discomfort many women feel with their bodies and their desires holds them back, both in bed and in life.
Anderson has undertaken several side projects focused on female pleasure, such as a new book, I Want: What Women Think and Feel About Sex When They’re Free to Be Themselves, published this month. The aim is to help women feel more comfortable expressing their innermost desires and embracing what feels good.
“We think of pleasure as frivolous,” she said, sitting cross-legged on a cream-colored sofa in a black dress, with no makeup or shoes on. “What is the point of this complex, tortuous existence if there can’t be an element of joy and pleasure?”
To fans of the acclaimed Netflix comedy-drama Sex EducationAnderson’s approach to sex-based wellness will be familiar: Gillian plays Dr Jean Milburn, a sex therapist and mother of a teenage son in the Welsh countryside. In the early episodes, her character, who lives in a house filled with Georgia O’Keeffe-style art and wooden phalluses, is almost a caricature. By the end, though, she’s revealed to be a perimenopausal single mother with a newborn baby struggling to connect with her own sexuality and desires amid the haziness of postpartum depression.
“The whole spirit of Jean’s character is that there are no questions too strange and no fantasies too weird,” said Ben Taylor, who directed much of the first two seasons.
In real life
From Sex EducationAnderson has also played a somewhat rudimentary version of Jean in real life. Earlier this year, she wore a Gabriela Hearst dress embroidered with vulvas to the Golden Globes; in a video of herself in the dress, she pretends to eat a hot dog. Last year, she launched a line of soft drinks called G Spot, and on Instagram she shares, with a wink and a smile, images of objects resembling vulvas and penises in an effort, she says, to normalize the conversation around private parts.
When it came time to collect anonymous fantasies for the book, Anderson’s relationship with her 3.3 million followers was crucial. Initially, the project was called Dear Gillian.
“I’m working on a book of their anonymous letters,” she said on Instagram. “No matter where you’re from, no matter if you’re 18 or 80, if you sleep with men or women or non-binary individuals, with everyone or with none, I want to know your most personal desires. Let’s open this conversation together and create something revealing.”
The book was conceived after a couple of seasons of Sex Education, after publishers clamored for her to write about sex. She didn’t feel ready to write a guide to or exploration of the vulva, as one editor had suggested. But when Claire Conrad, her literary agent, suggested she compile a collection of anonymous sexual fantasies, she was intrigued.
In order to prepare for his role as Milburn, Anderson had leafed through the 1973 best-selling book My secret gardenin which journalist Nancy Friday collected anonymous sexual fantasies from women at a time when admitting that they fantasized about anyone other than their husbands was taboo. Anderson read it primarily to “get my brain into the minds of women other than me,” she said, which she hoped would help her treat her fictional patients.
In 2022, Conrad proposed doing a contemporary version of the book, and Anderson was convinced: it was a book she was excited to read. “Somehow, together, we came up with the idea of what would happen if the same thing were done again, how have things changed?” said the literary agent.
Fantasies for all
Anderson’s publishing house created an encrypted portal for women to send in their fantasies; they received 1,118 letters and used 174 in the book, including one written by Anderson (he doesn’t reveal which one).
Unlike My Secret Garden, most of the fantasies included in Quiero are from women who identify as bisexual or pansexual (Anderson herself has dated both women and men), representing a variety of life circumstances, religions, and income levels. The fantasies are grouped thematically, in chapters with titles like “Forbidden Ground,” “I’ll Catch You Here, I’ll Catch You Here,” “Unknown People,” and “Vice and Fetish.”
The women in the book fantasize about having sex in a church; with brothers who are heirs to an art fortune; with Harry Styles. They also wrote about their desires to have sex with a therapist and a best friend. Several dreamed of having sex with robots that were in tune with their every desire. And yet, “I was surprised by the amount of shame there is today,” the actress confessed.
Many of the submissions expressed the same feelings of ambivalence that women had conveyed to Friday half a century earlier. Then and now, they wrote of feeling ashamed of their physical imperfections, guilty about their appetite or sexual desires, especially when they went beyond heterosexual sex within marriage. They wrote of “their fear or reluctance to talk to their partner about what they really think when they have sex or, often, when they masturbate alone,” she writes in Quiero.
“I wonder if there is a correlation between being afraid to ask for what we want in our most intimate relationships and in other areas of our lives,” she said in the interview.
In the book, Anderson gives the impression that she is discovering what she wants along with the reader. “To be honest, I think there are two sides to me: the one who is good at asking for what she wants and the one who gives in to her partner’s wishes, who is happy to share her deepest needs (and not all of them either) but only if her partner brings it up,” she writes in the introduction. “Is it out of embarrassment? Or is it a sign that I wouldn’t trust anyone to that level of intimacy? Or maybe deep down I think that, in some ways, it’s better to be a little more intimate.” inscrutable?”.
Open doors
Anderson grew up in both London and Grand Rapids, Michigan, and her accent varies depending on who she talks to. (I got the American Gillian.) She speaks deliberately, pausing for seconds between words and looking into the distance.
In high school, she joined Grand Rapids’ small but tough punk scene and started wearing a shaved head. Her peers voted her most likely to get arrested. She has always had an aversion to being told what to do, but that hasn’t made her immune to the pressures of being a woman in Hollywood, she said.
She told me that for years, fans treated her as a role model, seeing her as an extension of the fearless characters she often plays. But until recently, she turned down many requests to speak out on social issues like equal pay or women’s rights. She found it difficult to see herself as an effective spokesperson, partly because of a lack of confidence, she acknowledged.
Before she turned 30, Anderson constantly worried about being fired from The X-Files and suffered panic attacks. Even after winning major awards for playing a character defined by her self-assurance, she felt unworthy and plagued by self-doubt.
“I kept hearing my voice, squeaky in my ear — especially when her character had to give orders to more experienced male actors. Yes, I was very confident at that stage of my life,” she said, and she largely pretended to hide her insecurities.
As she has gotten older, the gap between the edgy characters she plays and her real identity has begun to close. After turning 40, she grew tired of constantly criticizing herself.
“I was tired of spending so much time obsessing over myself, hating myself and thinking negative thoughts,” she said. Letting go of the clinging was liberating.
Anderson shared that she was inspired to champion sex positivity in the 2010s while playing Stella Gibson, a detective tasked with investigating a serial killer in the Netflix crime series The Fall, set in Northern Ireland.
The character’s physical, intellectual and sexual confidence inspired her to reconsider her own views: “Stella opened something up in me in terms of sexual confidence, and also awakened a sense of femininity and sensuality,” she said.
If Stella Gibson unlocked the doors to her sexuality, her character in Sex Education opened them wide.
Being on that series convinced her that conversation can help dismantle taboos around sex, desire and “everything that has to do with personal pleasure.”
So far, Anderson’s role as a real-life spokesperson for sex positivity has been limited to her personal projects. Her emphasis on sex (juvenile jokes and all) is quickly becoming something of a personal brand. It’s too early to tell whether this will become a real fight or remain a racy marketing ploy.
Despite her candour and her lightheartedness, Anderson remains tight-lipped about her own sex life. She has no plans to make public the details of her own inclinations, or of her long-standing relationship with her partner, Peter Morgan, who created the series The Crown.
“The decisions I make in the public sphere already have a huge impact on my partner and three children. To subject them to further scrutiny or sensational headlines is unfair and cruel.”
After 30 years in the public eye, Anderson knows how to reveal enough of herself to convince her fans that she understands them. That they might even be the same. And they want to believe.
Selected articles from the New York Times
c.2024 The New York Times Company
