Gillian Anderson has taken on the dark secrets of the Royal Family

Known for playing steely women, the actor tackles another tough role on Netflix’s Scoop: a BBC journalist questioning Prince Andrew about his friendship with Jeffrey Epstein.

Gillian Anderson as TV journalist Emily Maitlis in Scoop.

Gillian Anderson has made tough women the bread and butter of her acting career.

Anderson, who’s 55, rose to fame in the 1990s for her portrayal of FBI Special Agent Dana Scully on The X-Files. Her Scully was a sceptical woman of science, playing against stereotypical female roles of the time.

She continued to tackle steely characters across the course of her long career, including Detective Superintendent Stella Gibson in The Fall, British prime minister Margaret Thatcher in The Crown and sex therapist Jean Milburn in Sex Education.

That edge comes out again in her latest role as real-life television journalist Emily Maitlis in Scoop. The Netflix film follows the behind-the-scenes negotiations that helped the BBC secure a notorious 2019 interview with Prince Andrew, conducted by Maitlis. The film is based on a book by Sam McAlister, who arranged the interview.

The prince’s answers to questions about his friendship with convicted sex offender Jeffrey Epstein were heavily criticised by the public, and he stepped down from royal duties days after the interview aired, though he still occasionally appears at the royal family’s public events. A spokesperson for Buckingham Palace declined to comment.

To prepare to portray the well-known British newscaster, Anderson worked with a voice coach, watched videos of Maitlis and listened to her audiobook. Together they honed her everyday fast-paced conversational voice and the slow, deliberative cadence she uses when grilling her interview subjects.

Working on the film also gave Anderson a greater understanding of the complex relationship between the BBC and the royal family, the actor says, and the importance of independent journalism in maintaining a fair and transparent society.

Here, she speaks about playing fierce women, avoiding mimicry, and her take on the public scrutiny of the royal family.

I know you spent a significant amount of time in Michigan. Have you been back at all since moving to London?

I go at least once or twice a year because my mum still lives there. She’s well established. We were always going to move back to the UK after we went there. It was going to be a short-term thing. But that was more than 30 years ago.

What drew you to playing Emily Maitlis?

It was the script. It’s a Peter Moffat script (Your Honour, Criminal Justice and Silk), and his writing is so propulsive and muscular and bold. On the page it very much felt like a thriller. It definitely felt like it had an engine behind it.

The way that Philip Martin has directed it absolutely translates the momentum that was on the page into the film. In the end, I feel like we’ve done the BBC justice. I feel like we’ve done Emily Maitlis justice, that we’ve done Sam McAlister justice.

What did you do to prepare?

I worked with a voice coach. It’s a tricky one, her voice. It’s quite colourful. She’s both sometimes incredibly fast, like whippet-fast at times, or incredibly slow and there’s a lot of colour. It was fun, not trying to mimic it too much. I’m just capturing the flavour of it.

When the Prince Andrew interview actually happened in 2019, did you watch it live?

I watched it afterwards. I was nervous. I’d seen clips, and I knew that it was going to be uncomfortable. I waited a little bit of a time before I delved into it.

How did working on this film change your perspective about how the interview came together, or Prince Andrew and the royal family?

It became interesting to learn about how the journalists work behind the scenes, the day in and out challenge of finding stories that are topical enough to air, and the people who are going to come on board and talk about those topics, without it feeling that it’s manipulated or made too much of. The daily grind of that scenario and the dilemma for a respected program is challenging in and of itself, let alone the footwork that it takes in order to snare members of the royal family.

The royal family has been a big part of the news recently. What are your thoughts on the conversation around them lately?

They are human beings. I think very often, particularly in (the United Kingdom), that is forgotten sometimes. There’s a lot that is expected of them, and when they do something that is either too human, or ask for something like privacy … it stands out. There’s a lot of pomp and circumstance and mirrors to maintain public perception, but at the end of the day they are just human beings.

You have played some pretty fierce figures in your career, both historical and fictional. Do you think that there is a through line in the roles that you seek out?

Probably a commonality is that a lot of these women are pushing through expectations of what women are capable of, or what they should or should not be doing. Going back to Dana Scully and the position that she held in the FBI, they’re obviously strong, competent, intelligent, fierce women, and I do have a tendency to be attracted to that type of character. Human beings are complex, and it’s nice to see that so many complex women are showing up in scripts over the last 10 to 20 years.

Scoop is streaming on Netflix.

The Wall Street Journal