Flashback Friday: Gillian Anderson on Gwyneth, Kate, & Sean Penn
By Faran Krentci
Yahoo! Style: January 9, 2015
Do you remember your first Golden Globes? Gillian Anderson does.
"It was the '90s," laughs the TV star, who first attended the awards exactly 20 years ago. "There was a lot of velvet, and those transparent shawls, and everyone was obsessed with Gwyneth Paltrow and Shakespeare in Love. I was there when she won, and I remember people being curious about her speech - like, 'Will it be eloquent? Will it be emotional?' and it was an excellent speech. You could feel it in the room. I also remember really liking Ben Affleck when he won for Good Will Hunting. He and Matt Damon were so fun but also extremely smart. You could have a real conversation with them. I admired that, and I liked them a lot."
But when Anderson looks back on her own Golden Globe win in 1997, for The X Files, her strongest memory isn't of hearing her name called, or standing on the podium. "The thing I remember most vividly is Sean Penn. He lit up a cigarette in the middle of the awards, and of course, there's no smoking allowed at The Golden Globes! Not now. Not back then. Not ever. So you saw a hundred heads all craning towards this one man, and this one small stream of cigarette smoke that was rising up into the room. I remember watching everyone watching Sean Penn, until the cigarette was completely gone. Because regardless of what was permitted and what wasn't, nobody was going to tell Sean Penn to put out that fucking cigarette. If it had been anyone else," she says with eyes wide, "they would have been - I mean - I'm glad I don't smoke!"
Anderson's currently starring in the BBC Drama The Fall alongside Jamie Dornan (50 Shades of Grey), which airs in the US on Netflix. "People come up to me and tell me they binge-watch it," she says, "Which I understand is a very high compliment from Netflix subscribers. I've never done that with a TV show, but I did just binge on Serial, which was fascinating and addictive."
Has she heard the rumors of a Serial movie? "That's a terrible idea," she winces. "The whole point of Serial is that it exists in a whole other medium, and that's a big part of its success. Why would you need to turn it into a movie? You don't have my 'go' on that. It's a very bad idea," she grins, "like smoking."
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