The truth is out there, all right. At the moment, it’s to be found in the Malibu Colony, the 24-hour-security guarded beachftont endave where Anderson is residing under an alias while she does her big-screen Agent Scully. She’s set up in a spectacularly capacious, open oceanfront spread, a place of unearthly, preternatural quiet but for the roar of surf pummeling the shoreline. Barefoot and grave, Anderson greets me at the door, a fragile-looking, tiny, freckied, ivory-skinned 29-year-old. “It’s a rental,” she says wryly out of the comer of her mouth as she sees me gazing at an interior that looks like the kind of a place where a Joan Didion heroine would be found going over the edge. As she wafts me through the shimmering place, Anderson barely touches anything, skimming past surfaces and objets d’art the way one might do in a very good hotel suite someone else is paying for. She seems, with her erect posture and impassive expression, to be disconnected in the manner of someone who isn’t quite sure how or why she got here.
Out on a sun-dappled rear deck that faces the Pacific and is littered with playthings, Anderson sits us at a long table where cool tumblers and an icy pitcher awalt, and she momentarily eyes a pack of designer cigarettes and a lighter so accusatorily she seems to be wondering whose they could possibly be. “It’s been very momentous for me to be by the water and in the sun,” she declares, wrapping herself, Marilynesque, in a thick cotton robe and tucking her legs in a semi-lotus position while staring off at the whitecaps. “It’s opened up huge areas for me. I’ve realized for the first time how much I like to feel the sun on my skin. I’ve always been living in dark places. I’ve always been forcing myself into dark places. This, being here, has been very cathartic for me.”
And, no doubt, an antidote to the mold and mildew of Vancouver, where “The X-Files” has been shot for nine months of each of the last four years. Then again, perhaps her newfound love of sand and sea has something to do with the aforementioned Rodney Rowland, who’s a surfer as well as an actor. But more later about such things.
“You’ve become an icon in a genre that inspires rabid devotees,” I observe to Anderson, noting that on the Internet there’s the Genuine Admirers of Gillian Anderson page, from which one can download bytes of dialogue from various interviews, as well as the homy-guy-oriented Web site known as the Gillian Anderson Testosterone Brigade, not to mention the Gillian Anderson Estrogen Brigade for gals who find her “attractive, talented, witty, and altogether wonderful.” What’s her take on the massive public response she creates?
