This month on Showtime, Gillian Anderson is starring as Eleanor Roosevelt in The First Lady. I met Anderson on one of my previous trips to London around three years ago in her dressing room at the Noel Coward Theatre where she was then appearing as Margo Channing in the stage version of All About Eve directed by Ivo van Hove. The strained dramatics of the diva were more astringently rendered by Anderson whose astringency as an actress can so often be displayed in a rather bemused masterly take on her own artfulness as an actress. It is not exactly arch but it does often employ an arched eyebrow within the construct of a character she conjures. She is one of my favorite actors - and based on this visit with her she possibly could be one of my favorite people as well (some of those reasons will be kept off-the-record as she asked.)
I have long admired the actress – from her role as Dana Scully in The X-Files to Lily Bart in The House of Mirth to Lady Dedlock in Bleak House to Wallis Simpson in Any Human Heart to Miss Havisham in Great Expectations to Sarah Merrit in The Last King of Scotland to DSI Stella Gibson in The Fall to Margaret Thatcher in The Crown. I was especially moved by her performance of Blanche DuBois in Tennessee Williams’ A Streetcar Named Desire when I saw it at St. Ann’s Warehouse in Brooklyn. I look forward to her role in the upcoming film, White Bird: A Wonder Story, which co-stars Helen Mirren.
I have also enjoyed Anderson as Dr. Jean Milburn, the sex therapist mother to Asa Butterfield’s Otis Milburn, in the Netflix series Sex Education. I resisted watching the show for a bit because of its being set in a high school, but Anderson grounds it all with a grown-up allure. She certainly was alluringly grown-up when she welcomed me into her dressing room at the Noel Coward Theatre. She was kind and curious and empathetic and she laughed a lot. It wasn’t a performance but she did arch an eyebrow from time to time.
Here is an excerpt from our conversation back then:
KEVIN SESSUMS: Happy Tennessee Williams birthday.
GILLIAN ANDERSON: Is that today?
KS: Yes. That’s today.
GA: Oh, wow. That makes me really emotional.
KS: I saw you as Blanche in Tennessee’s Streetcar at St. Ann’s Warehouse in Brooklyn.
GA: Did you? But you live here in London.
KS: No, I want to live here. I want to be you. I used to hate London, but I love it for some reason now. It’s a nice place, I think, to be older. I’m not saying that you’re old, Gillian. I’m just saying that you’ve figured out a way to do this. I now live in Hudson, NY. I moved there last year without ever having been there. I lived in New York for 38 years. And I lived in San Francisco for five years before moving to Hudson. Have you ever spent any time in San Francisco?
GA: I have spent a bit of time there. I like many elements of it, but I find many elements too schizophrenic for me.
KS: But what I love about you – I’m not saying you’re schizophrenic – is your incongruity as an actress and a person. You’re both American and British. And as an actress, there is something kind of … well .. keen about you. You come off as rather cerebral. I don’t know if you’re really smart or not – I don’t know you – but you sure seem to be. There is something innately intelligent about you as an actress and a person. There seems to be a native intelligence. And yet, there is something deeply carnal about you, too.
GA: Mmmmm …
KS: I think sacredness lies in the crotch, if you will, of incongruity and that is where the sacredness of your talent as an actress itself seems to reside: in that incongruous juncture of the body and the mind.
GA: It is interesting that you say that. I am very … ah .. heady. I will say that I come across as more intelligent than I necessarily am, and part of that is in the acting. I often look like I’m thinking about really serious things when I’m probably not. My approach to the work is – in hearing you say that – a mixture of “cerebralness” and intuitiveness. And I think .. . I think … I think how I think about it is less an intelligent way in from the brain and actually more of a structural way in. It’s figuring out the structure of it, which is the cerebral element of it, rather than the thinking too much about she-must-be-like-this-because-she-says-this-and-then-that-person-says-this-and-therefore-if-it’s-that-how-does-that-play-itself-out. How all that comes out is how I sense it intuitively instead of getting too specific – although now I’m getting too specific in explaining it.
KS: More incongruity.
GA: It was tricky with this production of All About Eve because Ivo likes all the actors to be off-book completely the first day of rehearsal. I was very curious about doing it that way. I’d never done it that way before. What I did know is that it would probably be best to show up not knowing anything and not having any preconceptions about who Margo is or how Ivo might want to do it, or whatever. And when I’ve shown up before with “empty mind” very often the first few days are spent digging into the play, discussing the play. That is certainly what we did with Streetcar and my director for that, Benedict Andrews, so that by the time you are up on your feet you’ve excavated quite a lot. I mean, the excavation does go through to the very end especially with something like Williams and Streetcar; you never feel as if you’ve even gotten to the foundation necessarily – or, at least, not into all of its corners. But with this, I suddenly realized, okay, I’ve come empty and ready to learn and yet we’re not doing that bit of the process, hang on a second. I guess I’ve got to do that and I have to figure out what he wants it to look like and what he wants us to be. I didn’t quite know at the point we were going to start even what decade we were going to be in.
KS: That is what is disconcerting about this production at times. You realize while watching it that the temporal setting of the play still seems to be the time in which the film on which it is based was originally made in 1950. There are references to the characters having been in vaudeville together and the theatrical world of the time is still referenced in ways that it would not be now. And yet, the costuming is all modern and the “sensibility” of the piece is quite 21st Century. I have seen a lot of productions directed by Ivo and what always strikes me is not only the dizzying aspects – the visual tangents – of his direction, but also how he acknowledges artifice but within that artifice he demands that actors be even more real and exist within it. One has to mine real ore in an artificial quarry even more so than usual in the nature of acting for the theatre. He demands so much of actors – especially with the videos he employs lately in his stage productions – so that you have to be aware of close-ups on a screen as well as acting for the far reaches of theater from a stage. And when this is shown in cinemas in the National Theatre Live series, there will be another rather, well, performative Pirandellian level to all this. Speaking of empty mind, do you just become zen about all the levels and do nothing? Do you become even more simple in your approach the more levels there are to exist within and while existing within them have to transcend them as well?
(Above: Anderson as Margo Channing in the West End production of All About Eve.)
GA: Well, I think what happened for me was that because of the way that we started on our feet, that I didn’t feel as if I knew (until what we were being directed towards) where to place her, what homework to do, what degree of theatre diva she is in this world. Theatre divas at that time were very different than theatre divas today. Indeed, theatre divas almost don’t exist anymore in a really contemporary version of that. So can that actually exist? And is that necessary? Does the play ask for that or actually, because of the element of video, is it more of a Hollywood diva because of the film element of it and anything bigger than that will feel too Norma Desmond-y and weird? And that’s not stuff I figured out until after we opened. I was till trying to figure out what it was that we had and who she was in relation to all the elements and all the characters. I don’t think I fully got into her body until after we had opened for two or three weeks.
KS: When I heard you had accepted the role I thought: Why did she accept such an iconic role so associated with Bette Davis and all she brought to the part? And I’m a gay guy. So when you see All About Eve as a young gay person you sort of get your gay card punched for having done so. And once an actress decides to say yes to that part, then how does she obliterate what so many of us have in our heads – ingrained in us really – about Margo Channing? For me personally as one member of the audience, I witnessed something rather brave and counterintuitive. It was completely not what I was expecting. You went almost in the opposite direction to what I was expecting to see when arriving at the theatre to see a woman playing a theatre diva but, in witnessing your going in that opposite direction, I began to understand for the first time how and why Margo Channing was so fooled and conned by Eve Harrington. There is such exhaustion in your Margo. There is such I-don’t-want-to-do-this-anymoreness in her. To paraphrase Carson McCullers – and even sort of reference your own feminist book We: A Manifesto for Women Everywhere – there is a kind of “ennui of me” to your Margo Channing. She almost seems medicated. She seems to long to be fooled. She wants Eve to fool her. And in that, you have given Margo an agency I never thought of her as having. She is in charge of the narrative instead of its victim. She manifested it all.
GA: Mmmmm .. that’s so interesting. Yeah. Yes.
(Above: Anderson making an entrance as Blanche DuBois in director Benedict Andrews’ production of Tennessee Williams’s A Streetcar Named Desire at the Young Vic.)
KS: Why did you say yes to this? Was it a hard thing to say yes to?
GA: What I was saying yes to initially was that it was something that I had already sought out and was trying to find out if anyone had ever adapted it before for the theatre. At the particular time that I had asked that question, it just so happened that Ivo had it. So I tried to figure out who he was interested in doing it with, and then discovered that it was Cate Blanchett. So at the point that they came to me, it had already been mulling around in my head for a year and a half or so as a good idea. So when Ivo expressed interest in my doing it, I thought .. well, let’s say it wasn’t necessarily an immediate yes. I have had mixed reactions to his previous stuff. But in spending time with him, I thought, I want to spend time with this person. I like what he has to say about this project and how he is thinking about approaching it. And he has a sense of humor. I just liked him. So I said yes very much based on that initial meeting. Then I realized that no matter what, that it would give back. Because in doing something such as Streetcar in both incarnations here at the Young Vic and in New York at St. Ann’s, as much as I feel as if it did give back, it also took a lot. I thought if nothing else Margo will give back.
KS: What do you mean by that exactly – give back?
GA: That it would be fun. It would be only fun.
KS: I was amazed sitting in the audience the other night how much of the audience seemed to have never seen the film and were actually shocked and surprised by the narrative of the piece.
GA: Oh, I know. I know. I know. But I didn’t know this piece of it until later and that is that Ivo was not interested in the film and had not seen the film himself. He was interested in the story and the idea that he and Jan [Versweyveld, who lit the show and designed the sets] had for the show.
KS: I love that you brought up Cate. I was sort of afraid to mention that. But I love you for owning that part of the narrative of the production itself because that is another meta aspect of it all. Claudette Colbert was originally cast at Margo before Bette Davis took over the role, just as Cate was originally cast before you took it over. There is an urban legend that the story is based on Tallulah Bankhead and Lizabeth Scott during their time in Thornton Wilder’s The Skin of Our Teeth. But Mary Orr, who wrote the short story and play on which Joseph Mankiewicz based his screenplay, claimed that it was based on a story told to her by the actress Elisabeth Bergner and her experience in a Broadway production of The Two Mrs. Carrolls. Ivo cites both Orr and Mankiewicz as his source material for this adaptation. I did a deep dive into all this in preparation for our talk today and discovered this heightened coincidence. In 1936 – long before All About Eve and a whole decade before the short story by Orr appears in Cosmopolitan magazine – all three actresses, Claudette and Bette and Elisabeth, were nominated for an Academy Award for Best Actress. Bette won for Dangerous. I love that kind of shit. I wondered if you had all gone so deep in your own deep dive that you are doing Elisabeth Bergner and not Bette Davis. That you are tipping your hat to real aficionados of the piece.
GA: That’s so weird. I didn’t know that about the Oscars. Before meeting Ivo I did watch the film again and what I was amazed by was how much Davis downplayed the biting lines in the script. She often very much lightened and threw away the lines. Obviously it was a conscious decision on her part but, I thought, was it a conscious decision about her take on the character and that she didn’t want the film just to turn into this bitch-fest or was it that she was known as a bitch she didn’t want it to be hammered home as “This is just Bette Davis being Bette Davis”?
KS: She was also rather humbled during that part of her career. This was sort of a comeback in its way – or, at least, a reassertion of her place as an actress.
GA: Definitely. But because before I watched it again I had read so much about it being the bitchiest film of all time, I was so surprised by how un-bitchy it was. I mean, obviously the lines speak for themselves, in a sense. But I was shocked at how gentle she was with it all. She’s not overly drunk in that party scene.
KS: At first when I was watching this reimagined stage version of it, I wondered if it were a play about alcoholism and addiction. I’m in recovery, so I tend to see everything a bit like that when too much imbibing of any substance is part of a narrative. I wondered if her cry for help that she seems to be crying for is about that. But then that seems to dissipate after the party scene in the play. She’s black-out drunk in that party scene now though.
GA: There are only two scenes when she’s drunk. What you don’t realize is how it wraps up at the end is that when Eve takes over for her and calls in the critics and has these reviews, that is the same night that Margo forgives her and the same night that Bill has proposed to Margo. You buy a lot of stuff in a film, you accept a lot of stuff in film. But just in terms of story, we have to pretend that that is not necessarily the case in order for it to have the depth of revelation that she has gone through for it to be so quick, to happen so quickly.
KS: But to go back to what I perceived as an audience member – each audience member has his or her own perception – is that it wasn’t quick. It wasn’t even forgiveness. It was a kind of acknowledgment – or even gratitude – of her being in control of the narrative and allowing it all to happen and this new agency I saw the character as having in your interpretation of her. Maybe it is just your innate feminism coming through in the part and imbuing it in some sort of subconscious way.
GA: It is definitely more thankful at the end, yes.
KS: You also played Nora in A Doll’s House at the Donmar to great acclaim. What is the through-line from Nora to Blanche to Margo and even to Dr. Wilborn in Sex Education? Why are you attracted to these roles?
GA: I don’t know. I don’t generally go searching things out. It has always been about what comes.
KS: That’s very zen of you, very still.
GA: I’m not ambitious really … but I do work a lot. I find it hard to relax.
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