Every week in the 1990s, Gillian Anderson would throw on a sensible, well-pressed pantsuit and face off against a parade of extraterrestrials and boogeymen. Being a famous woman of the Nineties, Anderson also found herself somewhat inevitably facing off against the era’s IRL boogeymen, such as Harvey Weinstein, the huffing, puffing uber-producer who shaped the film industry back then. He’d always want her to star in “scary things” for him, she once recalled, as if TV’s most prolific monster magnet would want nothing more than to replicate her day job on the big screen, too.
“I mean, he’d try to get me to do his films, period,” Anderson, 58, says today, with the cool, husky drawl of a Wild West gunslinger. She’s famously bidialectal, due to her upbringing between London and Grand Rapids, Michigan, and today is on a video call from France – a neutral ground, maybe, but one she’s chosen to speak with an American accent in. Anyway, she remembers her interactions with Weinstein always involving “a kind of bribery” with an element of quid pro quo. “He’d say, ‘if you do this for me, I’ll do that for you.’ That kind of thing.” She leans her head to her right, before firing off a very Dana Scully-coded roll of the eye. “I didn’t buy into that at all.”
