Gillian Anderson

As her new murder mystery The Pale Blue Eye arrives on Netflix, Gillian Anderson discusses why women couldn't be flirtatious in the 1830s, her directing ...

Maybe I’ll wait until I’m in my sixties before I direct again.” She adds, “In 2024, I’ll still be living the two versions of me. “I optioned a novel [called The Speed of Light by Elizabeth Rosner],” she says. I’m not sure I have it in me to direct and be a parent. “It helps to visit the set a couple of days early to soak it up, and look at what’s being shot on the monitor. So the only hint about her upcoming “entrepreneurial-type stuff” (her words) is that it’ll be announced in the next year and won’t involve music – a nod to my question on why she released a pop song, Extremis, in 1997, and will never again. As 1997 was the year of “all things”, I ask Anderson if she’s written any scripts since then. “At that particular time in history, a woman wouldn’t be as forthright as Mrs Marquis is in her flirtations,” Anderson says. Was she tempted to do a Christian Bale to Christian Bale? You sensed what he was trying to create the minute you stood on his set.” Officially, we’re discussing The Pale Blue Eye, a gothic-horror feature written and directed for Netflix by Scott Cooper. When Anderson is recognised on the street, it could be a mystery for Mulder and Scully: what does that squinting stranger know her from? In movies, she’s been directed by the great Belgian auteur Ursula Meier; on stage, she’s led All About Eve and A Streetcar Named Desire.