Earlier this month, Gillian Anderson admitted in an X-Files profile in The Hollywood Reporter that she was offered half of what David Duchovny was offered to do the reboot. Anderson said to THR that “There’s no point in dealing with my side [first] because, as usual, they come to me with half of what they want to offer David.” Apparently she remedied that quickly and ultimately received equal pay, as she should have in the first place. I didn’t hear that detail when the article was published as it I didn’t see the original article and don’t remember it getting picked up elsewhere. In a new interview with The Daily Beast, Anderson was asked about being offered half of Duchovny’s salary and she expanded on it in a thoughtful and matter-of-fact way. She also had a lot of other great things to say about how her character was marginalized during the first three seasons of X-Files, and how she fought to have Scully just walk alongside Mulder instead of behind him at all times.

Scully was initially required to always stand behind Mulder
The studio initially required Anderson to stand a few feet behind her male partner on camera, careful never to step side-by-side with him. And it took three years before Anderson finally closed the wage gap between her pay and Duchovny’s, having become fed up with accepting less than “equal pay for equal work.”

“I can only imagine that at the beginning, they wanted me to be the sidekick,” Anderson says of Fox’s curious no-equal-footing rule. “Or that, somehow, maybe it was enough of a change just to see a woman having this kind of intellectual repartee with a man on camera, and surely the audience couldn’t deal with actually seeing them walk side by side!”

She laughs again, this time at the absurdity of the notion of Dana Scully as anyone’s mere sidekick. “I have such a knee-jerk reaction to that stuff, a very short tolerance for that sh*t,” she says acidly. “I don’t know how long it lasted or if it changed because I eventually said, ‘F*k no! No!’ I don’t remember somebody saying, ‘OK, now you get to walk alongside him.’ But I imagine it had more to do with my intolerance and spunk than it being an allowance that was made.”

On being offered half of what Duchovny was offered for the X-Files reboot
“I’m surprised that more [interviewers] haven’t brought that up because it’s the truth,” Anderson says of the pay disparity, first disclosed in the Hollywood Reporter. “Especially in this climate of women talking about the reality of [unequal pay] in this business, I think it’s important that it gets heard and voiced. It was shocking to me, given all the work that I had done in the past to get us to be paid fairly. I worked really hard toward that and finally got somewhere with it.

“Even in interviews in the last few years, people have said to me, ‘I can’t believe that happened, how did you feel about it, that is insane.’ And my response always was, ‘That was then, this is now.’ And then it happened again! I don’t even know what to say about it.”

She stammers for a moment, at a loss for words. “It is… sad,” she finally says. “It is sad.” (Sources told the Hollywood Reporter Anderson and Duchovny ultimately took home equal pay for the event series.)

On the legitimacy of Trump’s candidacy
“I heard these comments from people about whether Trump is actually on the side of the Clintons, helping create the worst possible Republican candidate, and I love that,” she says. “I mean, if that were actually true, it is genius in order to get Hillary in office. I cannot imagine—I cannot imagine—that if it’s real, if he really is as despicable a human being as he behaves, that enough Americans would allow and desire him to be in office.”

[From The Daily Beast, headers added]

I’ve thought something similar about Trump’s candidacy but my theory was that he was trying to make whomever the Republicans ultimately chose seem like a decent candidate. When his main competition is Ted Cruz that theory falls apart.

As for her comments on wage inequality, I like how she’s saying it so bluntly, how she’s not making excuses like “I know it’s a lot of money” and how she’s making the issue known and calling out her employer. Women are afraid to talk about these things because we may get penalized in the workforce and I do think it helps when celebrities bring it up.

Oh and I’ve seen half of last night’s X-Files premiere episode so far. My DVR only taped half as it aired after the NFC Championship (plus it was on so late), so I’ll have to check out the rest on Hulu. It’s kind of dark and brooding, which is how I remember the X-Files and they spend some time reviewing what happened between Scully and Mulder in the intervening years. I won’t post any spoilers, but I have to say I love Joel McHale as a blowhard conservative talk show host. It’s also nice to revisit these characters and they’re just how I remembered them. I caught the Fox Special The X-Files Reopened and creator Chris Carter said that the first and sixth episode would focus on the mythology of the show and that the middle episodes would be standalone shows. EW reports that the third episode is particularly good. (So if you’re not feeling it yet hang in there.)