As FBI agent Dana Scully, Gillian Anderson probed the world’s weirdest mysteries.
But now she has an X File of her own… she is haunted by the ghost of Maggie Thatcher.
Gillian, 54, played the former PM in Netflix hit The Crown.
But she says the voice and mannerisms she took on have become second nature – even popping up in new roles.
The actress said: “She stayed a bit longer than she was welcome.”
Gillian could not stop Maggie coming through when she played Dr Jean Milburn in Sex Education, another Netflix smash.
She said: “I realised watching Sex Ed – which I went into a month after I’d finished The Crown – in a couple of places there were still remains of Thatcher in Jean’s scenes.”
Gillian said she had rehearsed so thoroughly to play the divisive ex-PM that the role had become part of her “muscle memory”.
Speaking in the Christmas edition of Total Film magazine she said: “It needs to, at some point, become muscle memory.
“I started with research… listening to interviews, starting to hear the rhythm of her voice.
“Doing that simultaneously to reading her books – and, any time I was in the car, listening to her read her autobiography.
“It’s probably still in there somewhere.”
She added: “I think that my first scenes were so concentrated on uniting [her] voice and mannerisms.
“There’s a definite difference between those first weeks and what I settled into.”
Gillian shot to fame on sci-fi romp The X Files in 1993, alongside David Duchovny as Fox Mulder. It initially ran until 2003.
