Social importance does not seem to rank as the ultimate raison d’etre for the movies she has just done, but Anderson is frill of serious earnestness when I ask her why she wanted to do them. “First and foremost, The Mighty—I’m going to call it by its original title, Freak The Mighty, because I like that better—was a project directed by Peter Chelsom, who directed Hear My Song and FunnyBones. After I saw FunnyBones at the Vancouver Film Festival, I literally could not talk for two or three hours. It had that huge an impact on me. When I heard he was doing another project, I asked to see the script and completely loved it.”
Rumor had it that star Sharon Stone was not a happy camper while making The Mighty. Was that indeed a problem? “Sharon Stone’s not the leading lady of The Mighty,” declares Anderson, adding that by the time she reported for her own small role as Meat Loafs screwed-up girlfriend, Stone had left. “The movie’s being sold on her, but I believe she only worked for 10 days, like I did. Everybody remembers those 10 days. You never know what the truth is, but everybody was cautious as to anybody new coming on the set, like, ‘How are they going to be?’ By the time I got there, it was just about the work, about interpreting the script and creating, as a unit—which is what it should be about."
The actress’s goal in doing both The Mighty and Hell cab was to show off colors other than Dana Scully’s discreet grays and taupes. Playing in The Mighty “an eccentric alcoholic basically stuck in her life, in her concept of who she is as opposed to who she used to be,” clearly jazzed Anderson. She sounds both exhilarated and slightly tenifled as she admits, “I was flying by the seat of my pants. I’m only going to know if I pulled it off when I see the final cut.” Perhaps she needn’t worry; the director of The Mighty has already declared he’s determined to hunt down a follow-up project for her to star in. Although Anderson is equally unsure of how she comes off in Hellcab, playing “a not very bright South Side Chicago chick in big purple pants and big hair,” she describes her experience making it as “cathartic, in terms of the joy of spontaneous creativity.
"You see, being a lead does not interest me," Anderson asserts, just in case we hadn't figured this out. "It's about the quality of the material and who's involved in it. I want to be part of the process, and if the title 'star' comes as a result of that, then it does. But that's not a goal."
Having heard Anderson's name mentioned earlier for paranormal-friendly movies, I wonder how intensely she feels the danger of getting pigeonholed. “Anything having remotely to do with Scully, unless it’s something absolutely phenomenal, goes by the wayside,” she asserts, setting her jaw resolutely. “I was considered for Volcano, but the action genre is something that I wouldn’t want to indulge in until, you know, five, ten years ftom now. Contact did, actually, come up, though I don’t know whether it was something where I was actually being seriously considered. Jodie Foster and I are very similar in many ways.” Interestingly, the one role Anderson sounds genuinely sorry about having missed out on is the womanin-a-parallel-universe gig that Gwyneth Paltrow eventually got in the forthcoming Sliding Doors. Anderson calls it “a wonderful, very metaphysically oriented concept that just sends chills down my spine.”
