Gillian Anderson Interviewed on Jimmy Kimmel Live October 10, 2009
Posted by FCM in entertainment, international, pop culture.Tags: interview, pregnancy, scully, television, the xfiles
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this is a two-part interview from 2008 with actor gillian anderson, x-files’ agent scully…as if you didnt know. i have to say, this woman is either a fantastic flirt, or just a terrific actor (or both?)
notice the way she effortlessly interacts with one of tv’s biggest goof-offs, and seems completely approachable…all the while being hugely, gorgeously pregnant. i love, love love her laugh. until i heard it here, i dont think i had ever heard her laugh before. i guess agent scully wasnt exactly a cut-up…but agent mulder wasnt a laugh-a-minute either was he?
any comments about the x-files, scully, and any feminist themes of her character or the show are welcome. or…anything else you want to say! i could google the “feminist themes of the x-files” and list some other bloggers opinions here, but i would rather know what you think. personally, i always noticed how the story-lines revolved around mulder’s life and his work…once and awhile they did a story around scully’s personal life, and it was striking. thats how i knew they didnt really do them a whole lot (sometimes you just dont notice these things until they are made painfully obvious?) remember the one where she gets a tattoo? (she ends up regretting it, and almost dying). or the one where she runs into an ex-lover in the hospital…and his daughter is still pissed at scully for the affair?
yes, the three times scully’s sexuality is addressed on the show, once she almost dies; one was ancient history; and the third isnt really addressed at all, but for the fetus left behind by agent mulder in the last episodes.
i have seasons 1-6 on my i-pod, and i also noticed, when watching them sequentially, that scully was always getting kidnapped in the early seasons of the show. i mean really. how many FBI agents have even been kidnapped once, let alone a bunch of times? scully also quite noticeably gets a makeover sometime around season 4. gillian anderson herself has mentioned this makeover several times in different interviews: she says that basically, she wasnt paying attention to the way she looked, and someone in wardrobe was asleep at the wheel until they had been on the air for awhile and someone said “do you really want to look like that?” that signaled the end of the pastel pumps and shoulder pads, and the beginning of flattering hair styles and dark, unbuttoned, and fitted suits.
part two is below. enjoy!
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femonade 
Huge X Files fan! Probably more to do with the chemistry between Mulder and Scully than the science fiction element. They kept stringing us along! I guess the only thing that bothered me about Scully was that she was quite masculine. Was it intentional? Did she button her emotions up to “fit in” at the FBI or was she naturally stoic? Either way you decide, she’s an interesting example of “a woman in a man’s profession.” Ultimately, she decides to go back to medicine and struggles with faith in the second film, which makes me thing she covered much to do her law enforcement job.
i wondered too whether scully was just naturally “stoic” and it was interesting from a gender-bendy perspective that mulder was the emotional one, and scully the skeptic. it wouldnt have been nearly the same show, or as good a show, if they had played stereotypical roles. frankly, if scully had been as flighty and even as violent as mulder was in his emotionality, she (or any woman) never would have survived in the FBI (imagine her physically attacking skinner??? i dont think so). in that way, it was kind of like the lethal-weapon franchise, where the white guy was the crazy one and leered at his black partners teenaged daughter etc. that wouldve never been tolerated (let alone an “endearing” personality characteristic or relationship dynamic) if it was the black guy who had the emotional problems, leering at his white partners teenaged daughter. it wouldve been a completely different movie, with a completely different focus, would it not?
Loved the X-Files. The fascinating aspect of the show is that woman was logical and scientific and the man emotional and intuitive. And they never had a love relationship, and this revealed kind of a new world back in the early 90s.
It was perhaps the last show of the Watergate generation, where the government was deeply implicated in an evil CIA like world. Chris Carter must have graduated from high school in 1975, and so Watergate was his civics lesson. Then, shock, Bush won the White House, and we went back to the Daddy knows best form of government, a new generation actually enlisting in the military after 9/11– you can really see the difference revisting X-Files now.
The show revealed lived feminism in Scully, as she embodied the smart woman, the sceptical woman, the highly intelligent woman. It’s why I loved it so much, and wish more women’s roles in movies and TV lived up to this. Although they implied that Scully was straight, you could really read her as a heroic lesbian figure! 🙂 Thanks for writing about this show, one can forget sometimes 🙂
sheila, scully and mulder actually *did* have a love relationship towards the end of the series. the way it was done though was still extremely revolutionary IMO and stands out for me because it was completely consistent with the characters relationship throughout the series. they ended up having a baby together actually, and we didnt even know it until WAAAAY after the fact. the baby was found to be a “mere” human, and not the alien child everyone assumed it to be, so we were like “whoa, who left that there??!!” and we came to learn that it was mulder who had “left that there.” and in the second movie, that was done after the series had ended, they are in bed together. but never was their love relationship the focus of the storyline, either in the series or in the film. the impression i am still left with was that they were still completely professional, in every way. and to maintain a professional image is quite difficult for a professional woman to pull off, even in real life, when she is involved in intimate relationships. and perhaps particularly when she is involved with a coworker. and i can definitely see how someone would read her as a heroic lesbian…but perhaps thats just because she wasnt the typical hetero basketcase that women are *always* portrayed as, when having relationships with men. thanks for posting!
FCM, leave it to you to come up with the rest of the story… The early X-Files were really great, but the beginning of the last season kind of lost me. I didn’t see the movies either.
“The Lutheran’s layman’s league has one with the 10 commandments on it,”– my partner in the next room yelling out about a Rose Parade float! It’s New Years day and the Rose Parade sounds are floating through the house…
Anyway, so that’s what happened with Mulder and Scully. Turned out in real life that David Douchovny actually was a sex addict.
The interview with Anderson and Kimmel is amazing. Gillian is so damn good at dealing with a male goof ball–I was very impressed with her timing and wit.
Loved Gillian in “The House of Mirth” BTW.