This story originally appeared on Them.
Gillian Anderson being part of the LGBTQ+ community is not a revelation. As long ago as 2012, the X-Files star told Out magazine that she was once in relationships with other women, and has spoken intermittently about feeling sexually fluid since then. But in a new interview with The Australian, Anderson seems to be landing on a label: pansexual.
In the profile, writer Nikki Gemmell writes that Anderson “tells me she’s pan, as in pansexual, as in attracted to all genders; from the Greek derivation meaning ‘all’ or ‘every,’ adding that the actress said, “in my younger years I was in relationships with women.”
This would mark a step toward an identity term Anderson first publicly circled in 2024, during a conversation with The New Yorker about her book Want, an edited collection of anonymous letters from women about sexuality. “Now, at the age of fifty-five, I am thinking, Oh, am I pansexual? Am I bisexual?” Anderson told the magazine, reflecting on her relationship to her sexuality over the course of her career.
Pansexuality refers to attraction irrespective of gender — an identity many who use the term consider part of a broader bisexual umbrella, though some see it as meaningfully distinct from that label. In her interview with The Australian, Anderson got into some streamy specifics, saying that “forearms” and “nice hands” are her favorite parts of a man’s body, while “lips,” “buttocks,” and “the clavicle” rank among her favorite things on a woman.
Anderson is currently in a long-term relationship with playwright Peter Morgan and has three children from previous marriages. The New Yorker noted that Anderson, in that conversation, did not want to “overstate” her experiences with women.
Anderson has long had a devoted LGBTQ+ following, extending from her breakout role in the X-Files, in which she played the eminently capable skeptic FBI agent Dana Scully; to her run on Netflix’s Sex Education, which found her playing a sex therapist; and, most recently, the Jane Schoenbrun meta slasher Teenage Sex and Death at Camp Miasma, explicitly highlights sapphic love and intimacy.
In Miasma, released in theaters August 7, Anderson plays Billy Preston, the reclusive star of the first entry in a slasher franchise being rebooted by a young queer director named Kris, portrayed by Hannah Einbinder. Together, the pair unleash the secrets of the abandoned summer camp where the original movies were made while exploring their connection to each other.
Writing for Them earlier this year, Einbinder praised Anderson as our “mother of the year” — a playful award doled out in honor of Pride. “She is also mother in the sense that she does take care,” Einbinder wrote, in part. “I can think of a million instances when we were shooting Teenage Sex and Death at Camp Miasma where she was an advocate and an emotional support for me.”
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