Vanity Fair: Jean is blunt with the men she sleeps with, and she’s very unembarrassed about sex. Was that cathartic, after playing so many uptight characters over the years?

Gillian Anderson: It was cathartic! I wanted her to feel grounded and neurotic at the same time. I wanted her to feel like she had things under control, and yet she might be losing her grip at any time. I wanted her to feel that she really was feeling like she was trying her best, and yet kept making mistakes and saying the wrong thing. And to have a healthy sense of herself and her sexuality, and yet, at the same time, not be so . . . I didn’t want her to feel so sexually confident amongst [Otis’s] friends, for instance, that it was creepy and inappropriate. It made more sense that she was embarrassing. I know that I think that I’m a pretty cool mom, and yet my kids roll their eyes all of the time. No matter how cool the parents, if it’s your parents, you’re gonna have issues. . . .

My boys are not at that stage yet, and so I kept on having to tell myself to pay attention, because you’re gonna be here sooner than later. You think that you’re just acting, you think that this is somebody else’s life, but this is the life that you’re about to enter into in no time at all. Maybe you can learn some things about how to communicate.

I assume your sons are too young to watch the show right now?

Yes! I’m so scared of the day when they watch the first episode, because the very, very first scene is probably one of the most graphic scenes. That’s not necessarily an indication of what the rest of the show is, so I’m just hoping that somebody, or one of their older friends doesn’t say, “I wanna show you something.”

They might have an experience like Otis has in school when someone plays a video of Jean demonstrating sexual techniques on an eggplant.

I know. I know. [Sighs.]

What can you do? It’s your job.

I guess not take a role like that! What do I say? “Now, I’ve got two older teenage boys, I can’t do this.” But it feels like it’s such a liberating show for people. We’ve just gone through, or we’re in the midst of going through, so many rules and regulations, and there’s a freedom and a lifeblood to this, to these characters and the types of conversation and the types of communication that is incredibly liberating. And so that feels important to me, to be a part of that.

It’s also really nice to see a story line on TV about an older woman who is so utterly sexually confident.

I did a series called The Fall, and I played a detective superintendent who, in the first episode, takes up with a much younger police officer. She invites him back to her hotel room for what she notes in advance would be a one-night stand. I couldn’t do an interview [for that show] without that being one of the first three questions! [My character had] done that once in the first season, and yet that became the talking point, because it was so unusual for a woman to be that liberated, that comfortable with her own sexuality, that she could do something like that. . . . That should be the norm. What the hell? Why don’t we see that more often?

This interview has been edited and condensed for clarity.

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