To Serve Dana Scully

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I was (and remain) an X-Files fan, although I weirdly came to the series late - you'd think it would've been right up my alley from Day One but it came out in that weird period at the end of High School slash Start of College where I wasn't watching a ton of TV... I was, you know, living or something. That didn't last (the living thing) so I eventually took to the show like arborio took to rice, and so with X-Files fandom comes Gillian Anderson affection. And I had it. She proved her mettle off the show leaning on accent-work with Bleak House and The House of Mirth, both of which she was wonderful in. And then Hannibal and The Fall both came along and she was riveting in both of those.

But I don't think I really truly understood what she was capable of until I saw her do A Streetcar Named Desire on stage - I know this is recent history and you've probably got my lines memorized over this but her performance really did shake me to the core; I have never been as shaken by any performance on stage, and I'd put it alongside Ellen Burstyn's work in A Requiem For a Dream in the category of Any Performances Anywhere. It's quite adamantly one of the greatest pieces of art I will ever witness, and I'm glad I went twice. I wish I had gone twenty times.

Anyway it's Gillian's birthday today and on the wings of her Blanche Dubois we will now follow her anywhere, a devoted disciple. Next up, besides another greatly anticipated season of The Fall, is her role as Media on Bryan Fuller's American Gods, reuniting her with her Hannibal friend. Media is the God of (you guessed it) the Media in the story and the character always takes the shape of different pop-culture icons - Anderson herself released the first image of herself done up as Marilyn Monroe. Meanwhile I've seen the picture of her done up as Lucille Ball passed around as another incantation of Media but it's not the case - that's from an old photo-shoot she did, you can see all of those pictures here. But still, why not ask this question anyway...

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