Gillian Anderson says her sexy Nineties photoshoots were ‘preposterous’

‘They didn’t represent me at all,’ the ‘Sex Education’ star said, while recalling an era in which she was voted ‘World’s Sexiest Woman’

Gillian Anderson has said she found her pin-up fame while working on The X-Files in the Nineties, and the sexy photoshoots she took part in at the time, “preposterous”.

The British-American actor, who has drawn acclaim for roles in Sex Education and The Crown in recent years, was catapulted into fame in 1993 as FBI agent Dana Scully in The X-Files. And it also brought attention of a different sort, namely in the form of lads’ mags.

In a new interview, Anderson recalled the major differences between her actual life and the image she portrayed in magazines and photoshoots.

“It felt so preposterous to me,” she told The Guardian. “If you saw my life and where I am half the time, between work and set and kids and driving and drop-offs and pick-ups and all that sort of stuff – the fact that you’d end up with those pictures is just so … ”

Anderson gave birth to her first child, Piper, during the second season of The X-Files, and spent the rest of the series as a working mum.

“[Those shoots were] just part of the fantasy. It doesn’t feel like it represents me at all.”

Anderson will soon release a book collection of anonymous letters titled Want, comprised of sexual fantasies submitted by women from around the globe. In the book, for which Anderson contributes her own anonymous fantasy as well as stories from her life and career, she writes about the oddness she experienced as a Nineties star.

“I had a surreal experience in 1996 when I was voted world’s sexiest woman by readers of FHM magazine,” she recalls, dubbing it “a type of worship not far off some of the descriptions in these fantasies”.

She also recalls discovering erotic fan-fiction online inspired by her performance as Margaret Thatcher in The Crown.

Anderson found fame in 1993 alongside David Duchovny in ‘The X-Files’ (Getty Images)

Earlier this month, the actor further revisited the Nineties by explaining the context of a clip that had gone viral on Twitter/X, in which she appears to kiss her X-Files co-star David Duchovny – and not her boyfriend at the time – while picking up an award at the Emmys.

Anderson was last seen on-screen in the Netflix film Scoop, in which she played former Newsnight presenter Emily Maitlis. The actor said that she happened to run into the real Maitlis at a charity event while preparing to play her, and remembered feeling embarrassed as she was “really dishevelled” at the time.