For Gillian Anderson, acting is her bread and butter but sex is her business.
For the past five years, she’s been offering her opinions on other people’s sex lives as Jean Milburn, the boundaryless sex therapist in Netflix’s hit teen dramedy series Sex Education.
The role seeped into her own life when she began posting photos of phallic- and vulvic-shaped everyday objects on her Instagram account, tagging them #penisoftheday and #yonioftheday.
Then, she launched a range of sugar-free natural soft drinks called G Spot (how lucky her name is not spelled Jillian – there’d be far fewer sex-related branding opportunities) that come in four pleasure-based moods: Soothe, Lift, Protect and Arouse.
Now, she’s asked for and received thousands of pages of erotic fantasies, submitted straight from the minds of anonymous women across the globe – including several particularly surprising and steamy entries from Australians.
Anderson read every single one and compiled more than 170 of them into an anthology titled Want, with a cover that features a cheeky and suggestive ‘on’ switch.
In the October issue of marie claire (on sale Thursday), she tells us in an exclusive interview that her own sexual fantasy is buried in there somewhere. “My pen was hovering over the page for such a long time,” she says, laughing about what it was like to submit something so personal into a very public book.
“I realised I’d never written some of those words before. … I might have been able to say them, but something about actually writing them felt so much more exposing.”
Throughout our conversation, which took place while Anderson was filming the Wild West series The Abandons in Canada, she talks candidly about when she started to feel comfortable in her sexuality, and how her identity has not been a static entity throughout her life.
She also shares her favourite fantasies (hint: it involves breastfeeding) and how she’s in awe of the depths a woman’s erotic imagination can go to.
With Want, Anderson is not trying to turn you on – although there’s a fair chance that will happen – she’s trying to show women that they don’t need to be ashamed of having fantasies. For some people, a fantasy is a lifeline; for others, a fun little daydream to pass the time on the train (there are a lot of train fantasies in here). Others judge themselves for their own fantasies and feel like there’s something wrong with them for what turns them on.
In a very Jean Milburn-esque way, Anderson reassures us that there is absolutely nothing wrong with a fantasy. Want, she says, is an “invitation to face society’s taboos and as for what we really actually want from each other, from ourselves, and from life.”
Read features editor Alexandra English’s exclusive full interview with Gillian Anderson in the October issue of marie claire, on sale Thursday 19th September.
This article originally appeared on Marie Claire Australia and is republished here with permission.
