Sunday Times UK Interview
Posted at 4:50 PM (PDT) on Saturday, September 17, 2005

Today's Sunday Times has a 3-page interview!

Excerpts:

Gillian Anderson put up with fearsome monsters and Canadian winters for The X Files - then said she wouldn't do TV again. How did a BBC period drama change her mind? Tony Barrell reports.

The BBC, which wanted the 37-year-old actress badly for a plum role in a blockbuster serial, wasn't even sure where she was. There were 85 parts to cast, pronto, and if Anderson was on another continent, ensconced within an overprotective cordon of publicists and minders, it might take too long to reach her. "We didn't believe for one second we'd be able to get through to her," says Nigel Stafford-Clark, the serial's producer. "I thought she lived in Los Angeles. And it was our casting director, Kate Rhodes James, who said, "No, she lives over here, in Britain.'"

The trouble was the T-word. Anderson, who has a reputation for being extremely selective, had been turning down all television work. "I don't want to be pigeonholed as being somebody who does television, quite frankly," she explains now, in a slightly surprising English accent, as she sucks on a self-rolled Golden Virginia cigarette in a west London hotel. Had The X Files put her off TV work? "I think so. But also I'm a big film buff and I love the medium of film, and there's a lot that I would still like to do in film, and people I'd like to work with." She remembers a feisty exchange with her agent over the Bleak House offer: "My first response was, 'Look, we've had this conversation. I'm not interested in doing television.' And then my agent kept saying, 'But hang on, this is the BBC, which is very different from daily television in the States. This is a respectable project, and is actually really good.'"

Shooting started in February and wrapped in the summer, and Anderson couldn't be more pleased with her decision to revoke her TV ban. "It was just an extraordinary experience. And I got incredibly attached to the character. Sometimes one just falls in love with being another person and who that person is, and the complexities of her life. And I miss Lady Dedlock - I can honestly say it's as if she's a friend that's moved away to another country."

Nigel Stafford-Clark talks about the actress as if she were the brightest ray of sunshine on the Bleak House set. "We don't want her to go, really," he admitted on her last day on the project. "She's been such a wonderful presence. She is a remarkable woman, Gillian - quite apart from the fact that she is the perfect Lady Dedlock."

To read the whole article, click here.