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ALLURE
December, 1997
PLANET HOLLYWOOD
by Joel Achenbach
She believes in aliens and stars in a new movie as a biker chick living with
Meat Loaf. The truth is out there - and so is Gillian Anderson.
Her house has strength: hardwood floors, rustic wood furniture, a fireplace made
of river stones. There are also some odd touches, such as the bug collection on
the dining-room table, which includes big ugly things with labels like: Five
Horn Rhino Beetle and Giant Brown Cicada. There's an eclectic mix of art on the
walls: a painting by an Aboriginal shaman hanging alongside the moody, spiritual
landscapes of rising young artist Darren Waterson. Someone needs to turn a few
lights on; it's as though the gloom has been sucked inside form the Vancouver
skies. The weather, she says, is "just depressing as hell."
Gillian Anderson has never shown her place to a reporter before. There are many
versions of her, and Homeowner Gillian is one she's proud of.
"I wouldn't say I'm normal. But I'm relatively stable," she had said
the day before on the set of The X-Files. "When I think of normal, I think
of mediocrity, and mediocrity scares the fuck out of me."
Next to the living-room, a messy office. Shots from the set of The X-Files,
publicity photos, magazine covers, memorabilia are stashed randomly, the floor
covered with what she says used to be orderly piles of paper. More chaos at the
top of the stairs: her suitcases from her last, prolonged trip to California to
film the X-Files movie. She's been at home 23 days and she still hasn't
unpacked.
She wanders through her house in tight black jeans and black clogs and a white
tank top that flatters her strong back and shoulders. Near the sixth or seventh
vertebra, approximately, can be seen the gluey remnants of a bandage that FBI
agent Dana Scully had to wear after some highly experimental surgery involving
an object that may or may not be of this earth. (I cannot say more. Secrecy is
paramount around the set of The X-Files. Fans are obsessive, and all scripts
must be shredded before they are thrown in the trash. I worried the whole time I
was on the set that I might learn something so sensitive, it would eventually
get me killed.)
Time to head to Starbucks. She zips on a black jacket with a high, sharp collar.
She has become black from head to toe, a dimension, she claims, of five feet
three inches. She gets into a sports car. She discourages any mention of the
make or model, for some reason, but it can be reported that the interior is
black, including the black cell phone and the black cup holder into which we
will put our coffee cups. (The coffee will not be black. Anderson will only
drink something called a decaf nonfat foamy mocha.")
She drives aggressively. "See how it handles? Don't you feel safe?"
she says, accelerating. It isn't clear if she really is someone who zips through
her world in a sports car or if she is merely playing a role. Maybe she's just
experimenting with a Sports Car Gillian persona, like someone shopping for a new
winter coat.
She definitely wants to move beyond Dana Scully. She's soon to appear in The
Mighty (Sharon Stone also stars), playing a biker chick who's living with Meat
Loaf. She's performed in music video and posed for avant-garde magazine
photographs. She doesn't want to be known as just a smart-looking actress. For
gosh sakes, she used to be a punk! She's only 29-it's not too late to show the
world that she has stranger, wilder images to project, that she can be something
besides a repressed, hyperrational, medical-degreed FBI agent who wouldn't know
a space alien if it poked her with its antennae.
Finally we reach a shopping center, and something odd happens. A stranger leans
out the window of a Chevy Suburban and says, "Congratulations!"
Anderson is caught offguard. "Thank you," she says. For the next few
minutes she is tongue-tied, unnerved, pacing the coffee bar.
"It's jarring," she says. Three days earlier, she had won the Emmy for
Best Actress in a Dramatic Series, and it is only natural that people would
applaud her when she goes out in public. But success is something she doesn't
always wear very well. She's someone who is stressed out by the demands of her
life, a single working mother who can't find time to unpack her bags after a
trip, who is rattled by junk mail, unsure what to answer and what to throw away.
"I wish my mom were around to give me a ten-minute time-out," she
says. "To say, 'Go over, sit in the corner, no talking.' I wish there were
someone to force me to do that."
Five years ago she was a complete unknown, living with a boyfriend in L.A.,
collecting unemployment. Improbably, she was cast in a new show called The
X-Files and learned the basics of TV work while millions watched and the crew
waited for her to get her lines right. As the show became a cult hit, she
suddenly married the assistant art director during a Hawaiian Vacation.
Pregnant, she feared she'd get fired because of her dramatic weight gain, but
the show's writers arranged for her to be abducted, giving her just enough time
to deliver the baby and have ten days off. Then the marriage ended. Somewhere
along the way she gave a zillion interviews and won a bunch of acting awards,
culminating in the Emmy. Altogether, an insane mixture of triumph and turmoil.
Anderson has discovered the simple truth that at every level of the game a
person-whether famous or obscure, rich or poor-can find ways of screwing up. At
the Emmys she made a spectacular faux pas on prime-time national television
(besides being painfully unable to walk in her dress): She chose to thank her
family during her acceptance speech, a sweet gesture, but shockingly did not
mention any of her collaborators on The X-Files.
"I got a very strong vibe the next day that I had made a mistake," she
says. Anderson did her best to remedy the situation by placing an ad in the
Hollywood trade publications thanking the show's creator, Chris Carter, her
costar, David Duchovny, and the rest of the cast and crew. "There was this
huge weight of having hurt people," she says. "It's the story of my
life. I create these situations where I can't fully enjoy the moment."
A good example would be her big break, getting the role of Scully. She was
terrified she'd be fired. "I thought, any second they're going to find out
I can't act, and they should have hired someone else," she says. Anderson
recalls that one scene in which she had to give commands in an authoritative
fashion to a team of FBI agents required 19 takes. She just couldn't imagine
herself having as much strength and power as Scully was supposed to have. (After
all, when she and Duchovny identify themselves as agents she sometimes has to
stand on a box to lessen the dramatic difference in their heights.)
But Anderson got better. Professional Gillian triumphed. "She works like a
dog and is always pleasant," says X-Files executive producer Robert W.
Goodwin.
"Gillian has a lot of will," Duchovny says two days after the Emmys.
He and Anderson have a big scene in a hospital room, and as Duchovny utters his
lines, Anderson tears up.
"Print it! Excellent! Fucking great, great!" the director cheers. A
few minutes later, Anderson approaches her costar and says, "Great
David."
"Hey, thanks for that last one," he says. The tears helped him nail
his lines. "I thought maybe you had conjunctivitis. But you were really
crying. At least one of us was good."
The two stars conjure on-screen an implicit, ethereal passion that has no
analogue away from the cameras. "Gillian has beautiful eyes," Duchovny
says. "Her eyes anchor me to the scene. They're big and they're blue and
they're wet. And the top of her nose goes up and down when she talks. Her nose
is a good actor." She, in turn, describes their chemistry in metaphysical
terms: "We are fortunate to have a vibration that passes between us when we
are working."
Let's not dwell on the irony that Gillian Anderson, is, in real life, rather
like Fox Mulder, Duchovny's character. With none of Scully's skepticism,
Mystical Gillian has some unusual notions. Anderson believes that UFO's have
come to earth. "It would shock the hell out of me if the government had
never been involved in a UFO cover-up and if there were not life on other
planets," she says.
Why would the government do this? To keep control. "The concept of other
beings more powerful than us human beings places the public in a state of
fear," explains Anderson, and in that instance, "the government no
longer has the same kind of control." She is saying this in her trailer,
between scenes. She is tired. She says she doesn't really think about these
things too much and isn't sure she's right. But she keeps talking. In America, a
celebrity is trained to liberate his or her ideas, even the notions that would
quickly evaporate in direct sunlight.
She floats another one: Aliens seem hostile because they are projections of our
own negative vibrations. "They vibrate on another energy level than we
do," she says, and they are "adaptable" to our beliefs. In the
middle of all this, she smiles apologetically. "This is going to make me
sound like a complete nut," she says. Nutty Gillian. Perhaps this is just
another experiment.
THE END