Scully and Mulder, it’s like bad luck or The Smoker and His Butts. From today’s perspective, the dream couple of TV conspiracy theorists and science fiction fans of the 90s is an inseparable duo that produced television gold with their opposites.
When Scully actress Gillian Anderson tackled her most famous role, it was but no talk of equalitywhich was expressed in front of and behind the camera.
Sci-fi classic X-Files: Scully shouldn’t be standing next to Mulder
Gillian Anderson has been candid about the in the past sexist work environment at TV stations in the 1990s spoken. She explained to The Daily Beast in 2017 the small and large gestures that made her feel belittled, both in terms of the character of Scully compared to Mulder and in terms of her involvement in the series.
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X-Files
It started with the visual arrangement of the characters. If the filmmakers had their way, Scully couldn’t even be on the same level as Mulder.
When she was filming, she was told not to stand next to her co-star Duchovny, but always trotted several centimeters behind him when the two FBI agents questioned someone again. Anderson explained it with some sarcasm as follows:
At first they probably wanted me to be his sidekick. Or maybe just seeing a woman on screen intellectually interacting with a man was enough of a change, and audiences certainly couldn’t reconcile seeing them actually side-by-side!
But Gillian Anderson didn’t put up with that:
I have… a very low tolerance for this crap. I don’t know how long that lasted or if it changed because I finally said, ‘Damn no! No!’ I don’t remember anyone saying, ‘Okay, now you can walk next to him.’ But I imagine it had more to do with my intolerance and temper than permission being given. Behind the scenes, Gillian Anderson was also fighting disadvantage
In the same article, the future The Crown and The Fall: Death in Belfast actress spoke about the pay gap between David Duchovny and her. So she had to fight for three seasons to get the same fee as Duchovny, who was anything but a big star at the time.
Even with the revival of the series, released in 2016, the first offer was reportedly only half of what was presented to David Duchovny. In the end, however, Gillian Anderson got the same pay, the Hollywood Reporter found out.
It is currently unclear whether we will see Gillian Anderson as Scully again. There are plans for a reboot of The X-Files with a new cast, but they haven’t materialized yet.
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