Gillian Anderson, the 58-year-old American TV and film actress, came out as pansexual in a recent interview with The Australian, though she has previously discussed her past attraction to women.
The interview’s author Nikki Gemmell wrote “[Anderson] tells me she’s pan, as in pansexual, as in attracted to all genders.” Anderson also revealed in the interview that she finds men’s forearms and hands physically attractive, as well as women’s lips, buttocks, and collarbones.
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Anderson currently stars in the sapphic horror romance Teenage Sex & Death at Camp Miasma. She previously played bisexual detective Stella Gibson in the 2013-2016 crime thriller TV series The Fall.
She told The Australian that she is “a very sexual being” and that her understanding of sexuality has changed throughout her life. However, she added, “Once [Teenage Sex and Death at Camp Miasma] is done, I feel like … it might be the end” of the outwardly sexual chapter of her professional life.
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In an August interview with The Times, opened up about being in a same-sex relationship as a teenager.
“One of my first relationships was with an older girl in high school,” she said, “but it felt secretive and illicit and wrong, and we had to hide. Later on, I had a boyfriend who found out and broke up with me.”
In a 2024 New Yorker interview about her book of sexual fantasies submitted by women, Want, Anderson said, “Now, at the age of fifty-five, I am thinking, ‘Oh, am I pansexual? Am I bisexual?’”
This is not the first time Anderson has spoken about being attracted to women. In 2015, at 47 years old, she spoke with the Telegraph about having previously engaged in same-sex relationships and said she was open to doing so again. “To me, a relationship is about loving another human being,” she said at the time. “Their gender is irrelevant.”
Anderson has been in a long-term relationship with playwright Peter Morgan since 2010, and she has three children: her 31-year-old daughter Piper Maru Klotz, who she had with her with ex-husband Clyde Klotz; and two sons — 19-year-old Oscar Griffiths and 17-year-old Felix Griffiths — who she had with former partner Mark Griffiths.
The actress has gained many lesbian and queer fans by portraying strong and independent women, including skeptical FBI special agent Dana Scully in the supernatural TV series The X-Files, outspoken and confident sex therapist Jean Milburn in the young adult TV series Sex Education, and the measured but brilliant psychiatrist Dr. Bedelia Du Maurier in the TV thriller series Hannibal.
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