Interview mit Gillian in der Sunday Times

Am 13. Oktober erschien folgenender Artikel in der englischen Zeitung Sunday Times, in dem hauptäschlich über "What The Night Is For" berichtet wird, aber u.a. auch, wie es in letzter Zeit wieder häufiger der Fall zu sein scheint, ihre Jugendjahre als Punk ausgegraben werden: Culture Magazine: Sunday Times

October 13,2002

I want to believe

There's more to Gillian Anderson than Dana Scully. Now she has to prove it in the West End, says BRYAN APPLEYARD The new London house of Gillian Anderson - the X Files investigator Dana Scully to you, me and a generation of teenage conspiracy theorists - is being renovated. I am admitted by a boy, her assistant, joined by a publicist and led upwards to a top-floor kitchen. Designers, builders and the inevitable star's retinue of "people" are at work. The kitchen is Laurence Llewelyn-Bowen slugs it out with Terence Conran in a pub. Laurence got the dining bit (shutters, painted wooden chandelier, oriental table) and Terence the kitchen (every drawer a different, modernist colour, big American fridge, stainless-steel ovens). The narrow demilitarised zone is watched over by an old Young's pub sign: The Abercorn Arms. The microwave flashes its familiar SOS - "00:00", roughly translated as: "Help, they can't work me!"

The boy takes me down to the living room. Terence didn't make it in here. Moroccan doors, more shutters, big striped rug, big leather sofas, elephants, stone relief of Shiva ... India, basically. A book on the shelf is called The Great Cosmic Mother. It's affluent new-age, west London spiritual, inner-suburban orientalism. You get the picture. And then an impostor bounces breathlessly in. She's small and slim, with black rectangular glasses, hair untidily tied back, green trousers and a woolly, very see-through, very plunging-neckline top. She darts and wriggles - Dana Scully did neither. She also looks nothing like Scully, and she speaks with an English accent. Why they expect me to believe this is Gillian Anderson, I can't imagine.

But the really weird thing is: it is. The English accent is explained by the fact that she lived in London between the ages of 2 and 11, and this has left her with an accent that turns American in America and English in England. "It bothers me sometimes," she says. "It feels hypocritical, but I can't help it." Nevertheless, it's handy, because she lives in Malibu and Notting Hill, and says she feels at home in both places. The X Files people saw fit to dress her in a succession of dumpy trouser suits and had her play a sceptical, positivist doctor/forensic scientist/FBI agent who never laughed, darted or wriggled. The character clash between Anderson and Scully is so profound that it's all but impossible to recognise the one in the other. She doesn't, as a result, get mobbed. "Yeah, I travel on the Tube" - actually, she says "Toob", an odd lapse - "and it's okay. Most of the time it's just people sitting across from me and going ..." She mimes a puzzled face staring at her. "I'm grateful to be able to walk around in my life and not feel the weight of that kind of existence. I don't want to be in a situation where I have to worry if there's a paparazzo round the next corner. I have so much compassion for people like Gwyneth. I just can't imagine what it must be like."

I have now spotted the real giveaway. The mouth is Scully's: big, pouty lips and perfect, of course, teeth. Even here, however, there is the disguise of a ball of gum anxiously being rolled around with all the energy of a former smoker (she stopped in May 2000). But it is clear that I am interviewing Anderson the actress, not Scully the FBI agent. I had been reminded of this by an e-mail from her publicist telling me not to "focus" on The X Files. What I am to focus on is What the Night Is For, a new play by Michael Weller in which she makes her West End debut next month. She stars opposite Roger Allam in an intense two-hander about adultery. Her character is in her mid-forties, a decade older than her. Is that a problem? "No ... er ... is that a problem? No. "

The answer peters out in puzzlement, as many will do in the course of the interview. So why is she joining the queue of Hollywood stars in the West End? "I'd been looking for a play for a long time. I wanted theatre to be a part of my life again, and that's not been an option in the past 10 years. I did a couple of the celebrity events in The Vagina Monologues, here and in New York, and all of a sudden being up there, having that experience and being able to be creative in that particular way, it sparked something. It reminded me, and made me hungry and thirsty for doing that kind of work again. I read this script and thought: this is what I feel like sinking my teeth into, it'd be ridiculous not to take advantage of this. I agreed to do this at a particularly strong time in my life. But, in retrospect - what was I getting myself into?" Impetuosity and nerves define her. She grows edgy when I ask her if she's worried about the reception of the play. "Well, there are moments when ..." a long pause, "... the scope of the thing hits me and I go: ya, ya, ya." She's apt to express her more difficult thoughts with little noises.

The X Files hit young Anderson like a truck. In London and, later, Michigan, she had been a wild child, a punk with combat boots and a mohican. Her parents were, as she puts it, "busy", and tended to lead a globalised, gypsy existence: "It seems to be in our blood." She was, until her early teens, an only child, and then a brother and sister were born. It came as a shock, and one that was closely and probably not coincidentally linked to her discovery of acting. She trained in Chicago, then went to New York, then Los Angeles, with "a relationship". A year later, she was cast as Scully. "I thought it was a job for a couple of weeks. I had no experience, I didn't watch television and I didn't like television. I didn't know about series or pilots. There was something about the first script I found appealing - the relationship between the two characters, the intelligence of the two of them and her strength ... Scully is a genius compared to the small bit of intelligence that's in my brain. So that was fun to do."

She married an art director on the show, Clyde Klotz, in a Buddhist ceremony on the beach on January 1, 1994. They had a daughter, Piper. Perhaps predictably, the marriage broke up; Piper now divides her time between Klotz, in Vancouver, and Anderson, in LA and London. But Scully cruised through it all, Anderson's pregnancy covered by the wardrobe department. And the show went into the pop-cultural stratosphere. It was brilliantly, expensively done, and, as The Prisoner had done in the 1960s, it defined paranoia for the 1990s. What, I ask her, did she think it was all about? She talks about cinematography, cryptic writing, conspiracies and the paranormal, then says it couldn't be done now. TV shows about government conspiracies are out of the question. "Because of 9/11. Absolutely. Public citizens in America have no voice any more. You can't express an opinion without being considered a traitor. Something has changed drastically. Conspiracy has so much more weight to it, it means so much more. Before, we were talking about conspiracies around Kennedy being shot, but we've gone way, way beyond that. If we touched on it, we'd probably be turned off the air. A conspiracy theory about UFOs now wouldn't be of interest, and what would be of interest would be too close for comfort ... it's really happening right now." Mulder and Scully are dead, long live Donald Rumsfeld.

All of which, when shooting on the last episode wrapped last spring, would seem to leave Anderson, though now worth millions thanks to the show, with a problem. But she doesn't think so. "It was a liberation. I mean, could I have gone further away? I went to Africa for a month as soon as we wrapped. It was incredibly freeing and cathartic. It wasn't a critical moment for me, because I enjoy writing, I am going to direct, I am producing, I love design and architecture, and because I have great friends. There's so much in this life. I'm obsessed with art and video installations and I want to get involved with that. I feel like there's not enough time." And, though there is known to have been friction with her co-star David Duchovny, they live near each other in Malibu, and near Chris Carter, creator of The X Files. They'll make X Files films together: "Maybe one every five years or something."

So it's all fine, except for this terrible edginess. Her parents separated last year, but she says that's okay too. Her father lives with her in LA, and her mother is back in Michigan. She says they are now happily living out their full potential. But impetuosity and nerves struggle for ascendancy in everything she says. She has, she says, to watch herself all the time. "I have to be careful. There's an aspect of myself that likes to f things up, likes to destroy." And the whole thing is unsteadily underpinned by a very un-Scullyish mysticism. "I believe there is so much more that we aren't aware of on a daily basis, that our abilities as human beings are so much vaster than we give ourselves credit for. Most of the time, we are preoccupied with the distractions of the world, whether it's work, or things, or people, or gossip. We don't allow ourselves to be quiet enough to allow true joy and full happiness to settle into our world. And we're not aware of our brain capacity, of how much more of our brains we could use - telekinesis and ESP and past lives and so on."

Dotty, squirmy and uncertain as she is, Anderson seems to embody the polarities of the age. As Dana, she is sceptical science; as Gillian, she is the inchoate yearning for something more. She is saved, for the moment, by the fact that she really can act - her performance in Terence Davies's film The House of Mirth proved she was more than blank-faced Scully - and, with John Caird directing, What the Night Is For should prove that once again. I hope so, anyway. I'd hate to see her f things up. In the end, you like her because you fear for her. She guides me out through the builders and "people", past the artworks and over the scary glass landings of her new home. "I must show you my bedroom!" she cries as we descend. "It's so great." She was once voted the sexiest woman in the world, and I know young men (in particular, one Oxford student and X-phile named Kevin) who would have passed out at this point. But I keep my feet and stare at the arc of lights that surmount her bed head. "Very nice," I say. "It's been a real pleasure." She agrees, and I leave, hoping, in spite of my sceptical self, that she meant it.

Quelle: gauks