Advertisement

Gillian Anderson confirms that she's done with 'The X-Files'

Gillian Anderson has confirmed that she will stop playing Agent Dana Scully after the end of the current revival of The X-Files.

The actress had previously suggested that she may not reprise the role, but now it appears she’s made it official.

“It’s time for me to hang up Scully’s hat. It just is,” she said at a panel event for Television Critics Association (via the Hollywood Reporter).

“I’m finished, and that’s the end of that.”

But while Anderson is done with playing the FBI agent schooled in all things paranormal, a role she’s played on and off since 1993, her decision has wider-ranging ramifications.

The show’s creator, Chris Carter, has said that he has no intention of continuing the show without Anderson in it.

Collider said: “For me, The X-Files is Mulder and Scully. I think if it were without Scully, I wouldn’t do it. That’s not my X-Files.”

So that means at the end of this current series — the 11th — it will be time to seal up the files for good.

It may be that it goes out with a bang, however.

This season’s premiere had fans in an uproar, after it emerged that the father of Dana Scully’s absent teenage son, William, may not be David Duchovny’s Fox Mulder after all.

Spoiler alert

It surfaced that in fact the series’ long-standing manifestation of evil, the Smoking Man, impregnated her with “alien-assisted science” in a plot that first began in 2000.

The shock plot twist stunned — and upset — fans, some finding the fact that the Smoking Man drugged her beforehand a step too far.

It also upset fans that Carter, interviewed after the season premiere, seemed not to deem the act nonconsensual, or at least not appreciate the distinction.

Defending the plot, Carter said: “He’s the figurative father if he’s not the actual father. He didn’t rape Scully. He impregnated her with science.”

Read more
Frances McDormand censored during Globes speech
All the Golden Globes winners
Natalie Portman calls out sexist Globes category