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Gillian Anderson The X-Files star plays a sex therapist in a new Netflix comedy. Donal O’Donoghue travels to London to meet her

RTE Guide 28 December 2018

For her latest role as a sex therapist in the comedy Sex Education, Gillian Anderson tapped into her own life. Donal O’Donoghue meets her as the show comes to Netflix

We’re talking sex. And Gillian Anderson is giggling like a schoolgirl. The actress, who plays a sex therapist in her latest TV show, Sex Education, is seated beside co-star, Asa Butterfield, who plays her son in the Net ix drama. Butterfield is describing his most awkward scene which involves a fake rubber appendage. “I got o quite lightly,” he insists. “I have three ‘w**k’ scenes, two attempted, one successful. For that first scene I was inside a toilet cubicle and I was seated on a dolly.” Anderson’s eyebrows arch. “You were on a dolly for that?” she says. “I never knew how you actually did that.”

With Gillian Anderson you never know what to expect, on screen or off. Down the years I’ve met her half a dozen times, from the set of The X Files in Los Angeles in the 1990s to the set of The Fall just north of Belfast in 2013. Still in character that day, as ice-cool detective Stella Gibson, the actress was elusive and enigmatic. Months later, I met a journalist who asked ‘Could you understand what she was talking about?’ I couldn’t then and cannot still. Each time we met she looked different and acted different, as if meeting the press was also a performance of sorts, something to enact or endure or have fun with.

Today, Anderson is having a bit of fun. “It’s so cold,” are her first words, as she asks for the heat to be upped and for extra clothing. “Can somebody grab my coat? I’m such a wimp.” I doubt that. Anderson, who zipped past 50 last August but looks a decade younger, is unlikely to suffer fools easily and has proved a vocal advocate for a number of political causes down the years, including women’s rights in Afghanistan, modern slavery and People for the Ethical Treatment of Animals (PETA), for which she posed nude under the caption “I’d rather go naked than wear fur.” Her career CV is an intriguing cocktail of classical stage and varied screen work, an actor who keeps pushing herself and her craft.

On stage, she has won plaudits as Blanche DuBois in A Streetcar Named Desire and as Nora in A Doll’s House, while on the small screen she has starred in period drama like Bleak House and Great Expectations as well as thrillers like Hannibal and the Fall . Her CV ranges across the spectrum, from independent productions like A Cock and Bull Story and the Last King of Scotland to broad comedy ( Johnny English Reborn) and costume productions (the House of Mirth). If her most famous role remains FBI agent Dana Scully in the cult 1990s TV series about the paranormal, e X-Files (the 2018 reboot, the eleventh series, starts on RTÉ 2 this week), it seems that ever since, she has been working against being stuck in that box.

Yet on screen Anderson does have a type. Often cold and calculating, her characters bristle with intelligence but suggest brittleness beneath, a popular perception she plays with in Sex Education. “That was definitely one of the reasons why I wanted to take the part,” she says. “It was an opportunity to have fun and to play with the image. A lot of people don’t know, or tend to forget, that a good portion of The X-Files was comedic even though the rest was quite dark and serious. So I have experience of comedy, but usually when I’m offered comedy it’s the part of the straight man so to speak. So with Sex Education it’s fun to play with the humour.”

Anderson was born in Chicago, moved to London at the age of five but returned to the US, and Grand Rapids, Michigan, at the age of 11, a nomadic youth reflected by her hard-to-place accent. Her teen years were streaked with rebellion, a punk rocker voted by her classmates as the student “most likely to get arrested” and not without reason (on the night of her graduation she broke into her school and was charged with trespass). “My high school years very much mirrored the look and the attitude of Maeve in Sex Education, that punkish rebellious type,” she says of a similarly aggravated soul in her new TV drama. “I was maybe less entrepreneurial than her though.” Married three times, in therapy since the age of 14, she seems happy with her lot now, comfortable in her skin. “I’m sure I’m an embarrassing mum,” she says with a rich laugh. “I probably think that I’m a much cooler mum than my kids think I am. I haven’t had the talk with my two young boys yet. I do remember having the talk with my daughter but that was more of a long drive discussing all the horror things that could happen if she didn’t use protection (laughs!). I strategically had that conversation in the car so that she couldn’t escape, where I was saying things like ‘and this can happen’ and ‘then this can happen!’ and so on.”

She lives in London with her three children (Piper Maru, Oscar and Felix) and her partner, the writer Peter Morgan ( The Crown). For the role as sex therapist Jean in Sex Education, she tapped into her own life experience. “There was no research. I have seen multiple therapists over the years so I feel like I have had first- hand experience. Not sex therapists per se but therapists. For Jean, it was important for me that she was suitably neurotic and potentially hormonal for this stage in her life and that might not have been on that page. I was also having fun with a comedic character, I have not played a lot of comedic characters before so it was interesting to explore that and make the most of it. When I read the script I laughed out loud as I read every episode, which is a rare occurrence.”

So is it easy to talk with her kids about sex? “A lot of parents think that they would be able to handle the ‘birds and the bees’ conversation and be able to normalise it and make it cool in some way. But it’s hard. And when you’re face-to-face with it as opposed to it being some abstract thing that you will have to do, in that moment, it is really easy to skirt the subject or become tongue-tied. You realise then that actually it’s difficult to make this sound like it’s not a bad thing and not something that is dangerous or to be feared. It was more taboo before but despite what we are being fed in magazines and on social media etc., it’s still a difficult subject. It is very different when you are in your own house in front of your own child rather than when it is watching something on television.”

Sex Education plays with the taboo and terror of its subject as it teases out the comedy in a show that is a curious hybrid of US and British culture. Does Anderson sees any difference in attitudes between the two countries? “The Brits are historically known for being uptight and restrained and potentially repressed. So part of what is interesting about sexual humour within that realm is that it has a whole other element to it because of the juxtaposition with something that is innately relaxed and open and not repressed. Americans have a reputation for being much raunchier, although the Brits did have Benny Hill for crying out loud! And there is a bit of both worlds in Sex Education; I guess the aim is that the Americans won’t notice even if the Brits notice that the students are throwing American footballs.”

In 2017, she co-authored a book called We: A Manifesto for Women Everywhere with Jennifer Nadel (the BBC documentary maker who is a close friend). At the time, Anderson described it as a work of advice for her younger self. So is there anything in there she’d recommend to teenagers today? “Wow! It’s not any advice I’d follow myself when I was that age,” she says and laughs. “A few years ago I was asked to write a piece about what I would say to my 16-year-old self and one of the things I said was to make sure that you are following your heart and not a man or a relationship in your life. But (long pause) only to stay true to one self as much as possible and not be swayed by peer pressure to do anything you don’t feel intrinsically comfortable with doing. That’s it really.”

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