She laughs again, this time at the absurdity of the notion of Dana Scully as anyone’s mere sidekick. “Or that, somehow, maybe it was enough of a change just to see a woman having this kind of intellectual repartee with a man on camera, and surely the audience couldn’t deal with actually seeing them walk side by side!” “I can only imagine that at the beginning, they wanted me to be the sidekick,” Anderson says of Fox’s curious no-equal-footing rule. And it took three years before Anderson finally closed the wage gap between her pay and Duchovny’s, having become fed up with accepting less than “equal pay for equal work.” The studio initially required Anderson to stand a few feet behind her male partner on camera, careful never to step side-by-side with him. And, despite her petite size, Scully was never intimidated by men.īut while Scully asserted her authority at every turn, Anderson found herself fighting just to stand on (literal) equal ground with her male co-star. Her story arcs carried weight equal to Mulder’s. She was fearless, complex, and minced words for no one. Scully had become a shoulder-padded feminist icon at a time when few women like her were lead characters on TV. It was a lot.”īy the show’s fourth season, however, Anderson had struck gold, taking home both an Emmy and a Golden Globe for her work as the breathtakingly brilliant scientist. Twenty-four episodes and there was barely enough time to change clothes before having to get back to set to say another six paragraphs of medical jargon. It wasn’t popular yet, it was costing a lot of money, we were shooting ridiculous hours. “I just remember yelling at people a few times, which I don’t normally do. “I don’t knoooow if I handled it gracefully,” she says between self-deprecating laughter (her infectiously goofy laugh has its own special place in X-Files history as a notorious instigator of crew-wide giggle fits).
She cringes remembering her performance in the pilot.
The success of Fox’s six-episode X-Files event series, which premieres with an episode written and directed by Carter on Sunday, hinges in part on whether that chemistry-and the excitement and anguish of watching the agents, clearly two halves of a whole, engage in the will they/won’t they dance-can be reignited again, nine seasons, two movies, and 25 years of X-Files history later.Īt the time of her audition for the pilot, Anderson had but a few screen credits to her name-few enough that she didn’t know what a “mark” was, she says, or really, how filming worked. “It was not apparent until that first day that these two people were gonna click.
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“The chemistry was there from the first day they ever appeared together in office,” series creator Chris Carter tells me. I think I went in a little bit wary of his charm.” She pauses, then remembers something else: “But I think he’d just been charming to another girl right beforehand.” How very Mulder, I say, as Anderson breaks into guffaws. He was very charming, I do remember that.” I remember the hallway quite well!” Anderson says, phoning from Los Angeles the morning after the Golden Globes. He’d already landed the role of Mulder by the time he first read lines with Anderson in a hallway outside the offices of Fox network execs. Gillian Anderson was just 25 years old when she walked into a Los Angeles office to audition for the role of Special Agent Dana Scully, a medical doctor and FBI agent tasked with using hard science to disprove the alien conspiracy mumbo-jumbo of her partner, Fox Mulder.ĭavid Duchovny-then 33 and known mostly for hosting Showtime’s cheesy erotic drama Red Shoe Diaries-charmed producers first (“he was so intelligent and wry,” remembers Danielle Gelber, Fox’s former director of drama development).
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