Gillian Anderson Chases Her Shadow

After years spent building a successful post-X-Files career, the actress is ready to revisit Dana Scully.

- Gaby Wood

Gillian Anderson believes in ghosts. “I haven’t seen ghosts,” she explained in November when we met on a chilly day at a cozy London hotel, “but I’m very hypersensitive, and I generally feel like I can tell if a house is haunted.” She also has “a tendency to believe that people are able to see the future and read minds” and knows “completely sane people who have experienced poltergeists.” ¶ Mulder would approve. Scully? Not so much. That’s FBI Special Agent Dana Scully, of course—the skeptical X-Files character Anderson made famous, and whom she’ll play again when the show returns to Fox as a six-episode mini-series in late January. But Anderson thinks quite differently from the character that boosted her career, and you might say that Scully herself has become a ghost for the actress—a faint, permanent presence, and one that she’s invited back for a full-scale haunting.

Anderson, now 47 years old, last played Scully in The X-Files: I Want to Believe, the second X-Files feature film, in 2008 (the television series ended in 2002), and she has spent the years between then and now moving beyond her. To a large extent, she’s succeeded—TV viewers, especially in the U.K., are likely to recognize Anderson (now definitively blonde rather than a redhead) as the very British detective Stella Gibson from the BBC crime drama The Fall. Theatergoers will have her award-winning performance as Blanche DuBois in London last year fresh in their minds (a role she’s reprising at Brooklyn’s St. Ann’s Warehouse this spring). But with the attendant hubbub surrounding Scully’s long-awaited reappearance, it’s easy to see that Anderson has never really lost her status as a poster girl for the paranormal.