More Excerpts from Interviews
Posted at 6:59 AM (PST) on Sunday, January 22, 2006

There's a method in what many people may perceive as the madness of Gillian Anderson, the 1986 graduate of City High School who went on to fame and fortune as Agent Dana Scully in the highly popular "X-Files" television series.

"I like good material, and I like doing things that are challenges." Anderson said she would like to do a big American film if something good comes her way, but she intends to continue living in England.

"I think I'm going to stay over there," she said. "I feel comfortable. That's where I live." -- The Grand Rapids Press
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Anderson says she did take a year off to travel with boyfriend-now-husband Julian Ozanne, a photojournalist and filmmaker. The two married in Kenya in late 2004 and have visited 30 countries in three years -- among them, Lebanon, Syria, India, Sri Lanka, Russia, Romania. Some of those places are considered risky travel destinations.

"They consider Beirut to be the Paris of the Middle East, and it certainly is," Anderson says. "It's a beautiful, beautiful city that also still shows signs of the devastation that has gone on for years and years. Every other building has blown-out windows. But it wasn't scary."

Anderson also engaged in charity work overseas, including with an organization called Artists for a New South Africa. "Their primary focus used to be the anti-apartheid movement, but [now] it's on AIDS and HIV," she says.

Most of her upcoming work, she says, is contemporary. For her, it's all about good writing. "It's few and far between the scripts that . . . have something to say or are a celebration of historical writers," she says. -- Star-Telegram
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Ms. Anderson said she didn't grasp at first just how bold the Davies/Chadwick vision was. "When the cameras would all of a sudden jerk away from the scene we were doing, I got the sense that they were doing something different," she said, "but I didn't realize until I saw it on television some of the extremes they were working with."

She also didn't realize that a few of Mr. Chadwick's touches, like the occasional dollop of eerie music, might put her fans in mind of an "X-Files" episode. "There were definitely some similarities that I had not realized were going to be there," she said. "It kind of took me aback at first, but it grew on me so quickly."

Yet it was the contrast with "The X-Files," rather than the fleeting similarities, that most appealed to her. "It was just completely different from anything I had done before, and I was interested in the challenge of it," she said.

The program's popularity in England, she said, was a pleasant surprise - "Everybody was either taping it or home watching it" - but it did cost her some of the anonymity she had finally begun to enjoy since "The X-Files" left the air in 2002. "Whereas before I was able to go around town incognito," she said from London, "now I'm not." -- The New York Times