Excerpts from The Australian
By Michael Bodey
September 14, 2011
Anderson, who is best known as the star of The X Files but is now consolidating an impressive collection of art-house roles, says the idea that Atkinson and director Oliver Parker would cast for a Bond film intrigued her. It dissuaded any qualms she had about performing comedy.
Not that she feared a spoof. She says any return of The X Files TV and film series could best be done as a spoof.
"I knew that was their intention and the juxtaposition of those two things interested me," she says. "I also have never done a broad comedy like this, a high-production, broad comedy, and I've certainly been a fan of Rowan's for a while so I wanted to see what it felt like and see what the innate challenges of it were."
"This version of comedy is a lot more technical than I had anticipated so that aspect of it was a challenge," she says. "I felt like I was working a different muscle than I'd had an opportunity to work before and it took a lot of work. I had to kind of figure stuff out before I'd even shown up on set and I had to be ready because there's not really time to throw stuff out there and hope that it works."
Having also played an FBI agent and an MI5 agent in the upcoming film Shadow Dancer, Anderson was intrigued by the idea she could play something similar "and still try to make it completely different".
Anderson admits performing comedy is "definitely harder" than drama.
She recently completed a performance as Miss Haversham in Great Expectations. "I had an easier time on that than I did on Johnny English," she says. "For whatever reason, I had a really clear-cut - and it comes through the page, the text - idea of who that person was in me.
"It felt less of a struggle somehow, and maybe that's because I had control over how much to reveal ...control over what was underneath and what was on the surface. Whereas with Johnny English, it wasn't really up to me. It was up to the bigger picture."
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