Gillian Anderson on her book about sexual fantasies

Gillian Anderson tells me she feels “really comfortable” talking about sex. The clues were clear even before we met to talk about her new book, Want, a collection of women’s sexual fantasies.

The actress, once named the sexiest woman in the world by FHM magazine, wore a vulva-covered dress to an awards ceremony and owns a soft drink brand called G Spot.

She will forever be associated with candid conversations about intimate activities, following her role as a sex therapist in the hit Netflix series Sex Education.

But Anderson says even she “struggled” to put her own sexual fantasy into words for the book, as her publishers asked her to do.

“By taking the images that had been in my head for a while and suddenly describing the act of it, I added a level of intimacy that I didn’t expect. I also didn’t expect to be so shy about it.”

Anderson’s imagination is hidden in a book of 174 books that she has compiled herself and that is not for the prudish.

The actress, who first made her name as Dana Scully on the TV series The X Files, and her publishers received 1,800 anonymous submissions from women around the world.

The letters were reduced to thirteen chapters with titles such as ‘Being Worshipped’, ‘Exploration’, ‘Strength and Submission’ and ‘The Watchers and the Watched’.

Participants self-selected and anonymously reported only their sexual identity, age, income and relationship status.

Clinical psychologist and professor Susan Young, who has read the book, tells me that “sexual fantasies are a healthy and normal aspect of sexual expression, provided they do not cause distress or harm”.

They allow people to explore “in a safe, private and controlled environment – ​​their minds.”

Some of the fantasies in Want are touching—the grieving woman who yearns for touch and mourns the secondary loss of sexual relationships. “I wish there was more talk about grief and the loss of a partner and sexuality,” she writes.

Others are almost pastiches – a fantasy about “very hot, sensual, passionate sex” with Harry Styles.

One of the authors, whose Orthodox religion forbids women from going to the altar, fantasizes about intimacy on an altar in an abandoned church.

Anderson describes the stories as “honest and raw and intimate and beautiful,” adding: “We have letters fantasizing about having sex with strangers and talking about how turned on we are by the idea of ​​voyeurism.”

“What interested me most was the joy and pleasure the women clearly had in writing, how much it opened them up to a better understanding of themselves, it seemed. Ultimately, this is not my book. This is the book of each woman who contributed.”

Want is a 21st-century version of another collection of women’s fantasies, My Secret Garden, published in 1973. Journalist Nancy Friday’s groundbreaking book became a worldwide bestseller. It was the first time that female desires had been made so public.

Fifty-one years after My Secret Garden, Anderson says she was “surprised” by the shame that still surrounds talking about sex and sharing sexual fantasies with friends or partners.

“I thought it would be less today” and it was “a real eye-opener.”

Her book is an attempt to get us all to be more open about our desires.

“Sex and sexual fantasies are still taboo, even though we have shows like Sex Education and Euphoria and Fifty Shades of Grey,” Anderson says. And then there’s “the multibillion-dollar porn industry,” which she describes as “in our faces, on our screens, on our phones all the time.”

One of the contributions to Want begins: “I’ve had such a hard time understanding what my own fantasies actually are. So much of what’s portrayed in porn is geared toward men, and there are so many expectations placed on us as women, that I find it really hard to navigate between what actually turns me on and how I think I should perform.”

Anderson would like to encourage young people to read her book, “because there are so many different versions of sex that are outside the boundaries of what the porn industry presents to them.”

“There’s a lot of tenderness in it and women really want to be seen for who they are and be taken care of. And there’s a lot of romance in it too.”

Prof Young highlights a difference between male and female desire. “Women’s fantasies often contain an emotional or narrative context that is likely to differ from the more visual and sexually explicit content reported by men.”

Porn is “typically less appealing to women because pornography is typically generated and geared toward the desires of men,” she adds.

In 1973, My Secret Garden contained explicit chapters on fantasies of nonconsensual and illegal sex, including a chapter on rape fantasies.

We live in more sensitive times and in 2024, Anderson wanted to “create a safe space where women can share and read without worry or fear of what they will find on the next page.”

It was “the right decision” to refuse “letters that bordered on illegality, bestiality or incest,” she said.

Despite that choice, one short chapter, The Captive, contains material that Anderson says strays into “dangerous topics and it almost felt unfair of us not to include them, because they are fantasies that women have.”

According to Professor Young, these kinds of fantasies “of intense dominance, submission, violent and/or even non-consensual acts are not intended to be acted out”.

“They provide a safe place to explore interests and desires that are considered taboo, dangerous, or socially unacceptable.”

Crucially for Anderson, in fantasy the woman “is in charge, she can decide with whom, when, where, how much, how often, when to stop and when to continue.”

“So it feels more like an empowering recognition and revelation than something that someone else has control over.”

The 56-year-old star, who is still in her prime, recalls that “quite a few” of the characters she has played have taught her about sex and sexuality. It is “essential” for her to understand the inner lives, desires and fantasies of these women, to understand “what makes them tick”.

We don’t have time to go into detail about what that meant for her preparation for roles as Miss Havisham in Great Expectations or Emily Maitlis in the Emmy-nominated film Scoop, a dramatisation of Newsnight’s car crash interview with Prince Andrew.

But she tells me adamantly that when it came to her role in The Crown, “she wasn’t thinking about Margaret Thatcher’s sexual fantasies”.

In real life, Anderson is a star through and through; radiant, smooth-skinned, petite. Some of the anonymous women in her book struggle with body image and feel undesirable.

Even Anderson admits that he has “gone through periods where it hits me hard that I, too, am getting older.”

She continues: “When I’m in front of the camera, there are definitely moments… where I see the finished product and think, ‘Oh my God, do I really look like that?'”

Her philosophy is to remember, “This is the youngest I’m going to be from now on, so I might as well embrace it.”

Some of her colleagues are turning to plastic surgery. “I haven’t tried that yet,” she notes. “But at some point, who knows?”

She recently wrapped filming a female-led Western for Netflix called The Abandons. Anderson plays a silver baron, one of two “dueling matriarchs” opposite Game of Thrones’ Lena Headey.

“I own the city… This is my city. I often say that when I walk through the middle of the city,” she smiles.

When we met, Anderson sounded British, but in interviews and on her Instagram feed her accent is often American.

She was born in the US but has lived permanently in Britain for decades.

“My cells are American, but my soul is British,” she tells me.

Her next role is a Channel 4 drama she’s about to film in Belfast. Her Northern Irish accent is also “actually not bad”, she says.

But before that, there’s another round of publicity for the book to go through. And the obvious question, which I’m not alone in asking, I suppose: can she give any clues as to which fantasy is hers?

“No way,” she laughs. Like the others, “mine remains anonymous.”

You can watch the full interview with Gillian Anderson here. BBC iPlayer.