Gillian Anderson
sweeps in to the room, a tiny, mighty force. She asks for a coffee,
spots the fat-free milk and gives a look that would stop a grizzly in
its tracks. “Fully skimmed milk!” she spits with contempt. “If they
don’t have full fat, then I’ll take semi.” She looks at me. “The amount
of times it goes wrong. I just say: ‘May I please have cold, fat whole
milk?’ If people were just ...” She struggles for the word. “Perfect.”
She’s laughing, but you sense she means it. The fierceness is for real.
It’s been more than 20 years since Anderson first made her name in The X-Files,
investigating the paranormal. As FBI special agent Dana Scully she was a
starchy sceptic, unfashionably attired and blow-dried to within an inch
of her life. She definitely had something about her. In 1996, she was voted the sexiest woman in the world by readers of FHM.
She gave nine years of her life to the show, which ended in 2002, plus
two full-length feature films. Since then she has diversified, starring
in a series of classy literary adaptations – haunted as society beauty Lady Dedlock in Bleak House, heartbreaking as the ruined Lily Bart in The House of Mirth, spooky as Miss Havisham in the BBC’s Great Expectations, and grotesque as Victorian madame Mrs Castaway in The Crimson Petal and The White. Recently, the 46-year-old has enjoyed two of her greatest successes – as stony-faced superintendent Stella Gibson in TV murder drama The Fall, and on stage as Blanche in a feted Young Vic revival of Tennessee Williams’s A Streetcar Named Desire.
Now Anderson has taken Blanche DuBois a step forward – or backwards.
In The Departure, a short film written by Andrew O’Hagan and directed by
Anderson herself for the Young Vic,
she has imagined Blanche’s life just before the play starts. We are
given a glimpse into her ignominy: boozing from the bottle, talking to
herself, lonely and desperate. A police officer – another not-quite
stranger whose kindness she relies on – arrives to tell her the student
she seduced has made a complaint, and that she must get out of town
fast. The Departure makes explicit the desperate backstory to Blanche’s
downfall.
