NOTHING IMPORTANT HAPPENED TODAY
Derived from an interview with Gillian Anderson

in december 2002, i talked my way into interviewing gillian anderson. i was editing a web site for a play called 'what the night is for' in which gillian had been cast as the lead. i told my bosses that our web site could genuinely benefit from an 'exclusive' interview - something the public could only read on our pages, one that featured gillian saying something new, something about the play itself, rather than just rattling on about some tv show that she used to be in. and me, with my wonderfully cultural background, would be just the man to raise the bar on the celebrity interview. in retrospect, i have to ask: what the fuck was i thinking about?

first of all, it's been four or five years since i last interviewed someone even remotely famous and that was a three-piece near-teen girl band called 'cleopatra' - an action which broke world records of brevity. 'so, who inspired you to start this vapid excuse for a pop career?'. cleopatra, comin' atcha, replies: ‘michael jackson’. interviewer struggles not to think about the feeling of cold revolver steel rattling against his teeth. i bolted from that interview after ten minutes. their publicist looked disturbed, telling me i'd been booked in for an hour. sixty fucking minutes. i asked about fifty questions in the last ten, so how the hell did she suppose i could possibly get to sixty? 'who's your favourite tellytubby?' or maybe 'if you could ask satan for one favour, what would it be?'. i was about to say something preposterously rude to nice mrs publicist person when i felt a tug at my jacket. looking down about four feet, i saw a chubby little cleo-face grinning back at me and a small voice pleaded 'can we sign a cd for you?'. nothing can prepare you for that moment, nothing.

secondly, we're talking about gillian anderson. gillian fucking anderson. or, as rupert murdoch would have her known, dana fucking scully. one half of the achingly well-dressed alien crime'n'conspiracy busting duo 'the x files'.

irrespective of what you think of the show, you have to accept that it's one of the most popular shows on the planet. you have to accept that as shared experiences go, literally tens of millions of people have watched the same footage of gillian standing in a canadian forest, gun in hand, shouting 'mulder!'. as she does, every episode, week in week out, for nine seasons, twenty-two episodes per season. that's 198 episodes, each averaging 42 minutes each, giving us 8,316 minutes worth of 'weird stuff happening'. and even when her co-star bailed out on her so disrespectfully, gillian stood her ground. even in the closing seasons, in the face of woeful writing and tortuous twists, she bravely kept a straight face, feigning interest in whether her baby was actually an alien-human-hybrid-slash-supersoldier. what a trooper.

some clever bastard decided that fans of the show would be christened 'x-philes' - see the wordplay wizardry at work? and, yes, i was one of those people. i used to buy the videos before they were screened on tv as i couldn't bear to think that i would be lagging behind. i used to tape it religiously every week and archive them chronologically, episode by episode. and i nearly had a breakdown when i missed the middle part of the 'duane barry' trilogy arc. all of this is true.

so with those caveats in mind, how the hell was i going to find the required expertise to actually interview this woman, and to simultaneously keep still my beating heart, stop myself from laughing at all the wrong moments and, of course, being above such things, not mention the x files? four months after i made the suggestion, i'm there - i'm in gillian anderson's dressing room, watching her sitting on her bed, rolling up cigarettes and chatting away in a devil-may-care style.

seconds after meeting her, one thing is clear - gillian anderson and dana scully are two different people. laughable though this sounds, trust me on this one. they could actually be two different people. dana seems tall and commanding, gillian is tiny. she is kylie-small, she is 'put her in your pocket' minute, and so on. and then there's the accent - dana's north american twang is hard to pin down, yet gillian speaks in perfect BBC english. she even uses the word 'oneself' over and over again throughout the interview. it's disconcerting to say the least. and then there's her presence - dana is a federal agent and a doctor, the height of guarded professionalism, whereas gillian wouldn't be out of place on a free-love mission to haight-astbury, surfing on a cloud of pungent smoke and bloody good vibes.

to kick things off, i fumble with my tape recorder and make a lame attempt at trying to make her trust me by reeling of my 'insider' credentials. i’m not really a stalker-freak, i’m actually here to talk about the art… i don't think she's actually bothered in the slightest. this ‘interview’ is undoubtedly something that she feels sickeningly obliged to put up with. and i'm here simply because i want to know what it feels like to talk to gillian anderson. so this is a little game of promotional table-tennis that neither of us are really bothered about.

as for the play - the very reason that has brought us together - if i was being kind, i would just say 'it's not my kind of thing'. 'what the night is for' (by american playwright michael weller) is a play about the neuroses of the american middle-class. it asks 'are you content to be unhappy in your relationship / marriage? or are you going to do something about it?'. i could write another entire piece about why this is / is not an interesting subject matter for a british audience, and why the play succeeds / fails, but i shall refrain from putting you through that. suffice to say, the critics missed the point and slated it. i genuinely felt they were unfair and unkind - it certainly didn't warrant such a savage reception. the key mistake was to premiere the work in london (it demands the empathy / sympathy of an american audience), especially when the critics had certainly had their fill of visiting celebrities (stand up madonna, gwyneth, nicole et al). it was asking for a kicking.

all of this therefore makes for a rather dry and staccato-like interview that doesn't really go anywhere. gillian rolls out a few stock phrases such as "it's been the most wonderful experience from day one" and "it's been a fulfilling, creative and challenging process and i think we all enjoyed each other very much." for all my willing, all my joy and apprehension, the actuality is, unsurprisingly, somewhat flat. neither of us seem to actually be enjoying our little white banter, so why the hell are we here?

the play is about relationships, so that's what we talk about. now i know what it feels like to work for 'cosmopolitan'. "in any relationship,” says Gillian, “each individual has their own stuff that they bring to the table, and each will have their own perspective on how the other one is, or is not, living up to their side of the arrangement. sometimes, you meet couples who are great people and they are trying very hard to be the best that they can be, but at the end of the day it doesn't work but because they both bring out particular failures and neuroses in each other. if they were with someone else, a better side of them may be brought out, and that's an interesting way to approach it - there are no bad guys.”

indeed. but it really doesn't get me anywhere, this line of questioning, this rhyme of an answer. having neither purpose nor design, i can't hope to gleam any meaningful insight from this situation. i never really expected to either, i just engineered a situation in order to meet someone and then - there i was - the victim of my own banal interrogation.

i watched gillian on ‘parkinson’ a few weeks earlier and was amazed at how little parkie actually talks. 'tell me about your life' he says and then seems to just sit back and let people talk rubbish. what a shit life. he's the puppetmaster of all that never-ending parade of bullshit. can he, a grown adult, actually believe that any of this matters? who cares? what's the point? who benefits from the endless endlessness? bring on the puppets! watch the monkeys dance! now buy the dvd! we've all known from the day we grew any brain cells that the celebrity interview exists only to plug a product and it's generally a product that we have no need for. rarely, if ever, will we have our minds blown. and yet i’ve deliberately put myself in the middle of it. i am, quite simply, a media whore.

it's only months later, when i play back the tape, desperate to find something interesting and credible, do i discover an amusing analogy between gillian's answers and my predicament. here i am, feeling sorry for myself, beating myself across the head for being a fraud and an idiot and gilly says: "as human beings we tend to have some kind of attachment to being the good guy or the bad guy, the victim or the saviour, and we play out these roles. and even though we can complain about them, we can't get away from it. and when we then move onto another relationship, we're going to play out exactly the same role."

it's true, we're doomed to revisit old patterns until we make a conscious effort to step away from them. and, as gillian so rightly foretold, here i am - doomed to repeat this ridiculous endeavour time and time again until i truly take on board the fact that i should be spending my time more wisely. note to self: don't interview celebrities unless they can offer you a massive paradigm shift in your consciousness. spend more time being good to yourself. realise that you probably have more to offer the world then your average celeb-drone. then go out there and do something about it.

once we drift away from the subject matter of the play, gillian notably detaches from the proceedings and, as we talk further, her reluctance to facilitate any further discussion becomes painfully apparent. i pull a few reserve questions from the bag, hoping to gleam some interesting nuggets from her extra-curricular activities, but it's not to be. apparently, we're not going anywhere near there .finally i say "that's enough" and start pack away my little tape recorder. as i do so, i get the odd feeling that the jolt of the conclusion has enlivened her. she smiles for the first time and her face betrays a slight concern, thinking perhaps from her own point of view: "was that any good?"

that question fast becomes irrelevant - frustrated by the incompetence of the incumbent management, i leave my job, taking my interview tapes and my brainwaves with me. the interview therefore never appears and, funnily enough, the company's lack of concern is bourne out by the fact that the web site, to this day, remains in a state of warped stasis, still advertising the show, even though it closed several months ago. not that i'm bitter, of course.

and gillian? what became of her? thankfully, i have absolutely no idea.



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