She famously starred as icy detective Stella Gibson in The Fall – but now actress Gillian Anderson is hoping to play a cold-hearted killer.
The former X Files star says: “I’m very keen to play a murderer. I don’t believe I’ve ever murdered anybody. You have to put yourself out there.”
But if she wasn’t an actress, Gillian would love to be a real-life detective like Stella – who hunted Jamie Dornan’s serial killer Paul Spector across three series of the Northern Ireland drama.
“I wish I could be a detective,” she says. “I’d love to, but I’m too stupid, and too clumsy and I don’t take enough stuff in.
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“I miss three-quarters of what is right in front of my face.
“Also nobody would buy it. If I knocked on people’s doors, or showed up on a crime scene, people would be like, ‘Is that Gillian Anderson?’. So I wouldn’t actually get to do it for real.”
The fourth series of her Netflix hit Sex Education has been confirmed and the 53-year-old is gearing up to play sex therapist Dr Jean Milburn once more.
(Image: @farrow-ball.com/ @frenchandtye.com)
The comedy drama is known for its graphic sex scenes and Gillian admits she initially threw the script in the bin – and also feared the consequences for her sons Oscar, 15, and Felix, 13.
“The only risk I saw with Jean was for my two teenage boys,” she says. “When they’re having a mother who’s playing a character like this, it was going to seriously damage them psychologically.
“I didn’t get it at first. I have a tendency to appreciate much more subtle, ironic humour, and it was so broad that at first I thought ‘this isn’t for me, and nobody is going to like this’, and so I tossed it in the bin.
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“But I’m very glad I was convinced. It’s very different, acting comedy than it is drama – I find it harder. It may just be me not having had that much experience of it over my career, but I find that you can attempt to do something comedically and very often it might just not work.”
Having starred in 2011’s Johnny English Reborn, Gillian – who has just launched her own audio show What Do I Know?! – saw first-hand how tricky comedy can be.
She adds: “I know having worked with Johnny English – I mean Rowan Atkinson. I don’t know if he’s spoken about this, but I’ll speak about it for him.
(Image: Dave Benett/Getty Images for Net)
“He is tortured by that specificity – doing it take after take after take, and I could very easily fall down that hole.”
Born in Chicago, Gillian moved to London when she was five, before returning to the States aged 11.
She has revealed how she took on a British accent to make friends over here but then switched back to American.
It’s made it easy for her to play characters such as Stella and Margaret Thatcher in The Crown but has left fans confused at which is her real accent.
(Image: Mike Marsland/WireImage)
But Gillian explains: “Usually it’s about what’s in my ear. If I was five minutes on the phone with somebody from the States right now, I would fall into an American accent.
“When I’ve tried to control it I sound like an idiot, I thought this is freaking people out too much.
“Having grown up in the UK this feels most natural when I’m here, and then American feels most natural when I’m there. It’s kind of as simple as that.”
Thatcher was one of her biggest recent TV roles but twice-married Gillian, who split from The Crown creator Peter Morgan in 2020, knows not everyone will be a fan of how she portrayed the Iron Lady.
“I’m sure there were people out there who absolutely hated my portrayal of her,” she says. “But I did everything with that, and the best that I could do.”
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Source: Celebrities - dailystar.co.uk
