What's up with Gillian Anderson's acting?

[SciFiSam]

@Little_Nemo

She’s been getting very high reviews for her performance as Blanche DuBois in a current London run of A Streetcar Named Desire. I haven’t seen the whole play but I’ve seen parts of her performance and she certainly isn’t blank in the role.

She was pretty much perfect and not in the slightest bit blank. Just Blanche.

I’ve never noticed her deadpanning a role at all though. In TXF and The Fall she lays characters who try to hide their feelings most of the time, but that’s fine - some people are like that. In Hannibal her character was trying to hide her feelings in a similar way but failed, and again it worked. Great or good acting doesn’t always mean pulling extreme faces.

[xnylder]

If I recall correctly, both she and David Duchovny have said in interviews that they intentionally kept their acting low-key on X-Files, at least when confronted by aliens/freaks/other strange things. The post-production special effects were hit-or-miss, so on the first few episodes they massively overreacted to tiny things or underreacted to bizarre happenings. They ended up developing their patented “been there, seen that” look so they could be seen as reacting appropriately at all times.

[Boyo_Jim]

@Chefguy

Yeah, I get that: woman running things in a man’s world. But she’s just as cold during her off-duty hours. Unless she’s a sociopath, it doesn’t ring real.

I think the point is that she doesn’t really have a private life – she’s always “on”, even when she’s fucking a younger detective. She’s always defensive, always distant.

[RikWriter]

@Boyo_Jim

I think the point is that she doesn’t really have a private life – she’s always “on”, even when she’s fucking a younger detective. She’s always defensive, always distant.

And she seems to have suffered some sort of trauma early in life that made her that way, or at least it’s implied.

[Valgard]

@Chefguy

Is there a lot of demand for actors with no facial expression?

Buster Keaton built a career on this.

[PunditLisa]

I liked both Gillian Anderson and Mireille Enos in their respective roles. Both are very dark dramas with emotionally reserved leading women. And then you have Helen Mirren’s Jane Tennison. And Jodie Foster’s Clarice Sterling. I’m sure we could go on and on.

I think it’s fair to say that homocide detectives, as a rule (male or female), are usually written to be emotionally cold. That’s probably true in real life. If they were emotionally balanced, they’d end up quivering in the corner after a few gut wrenching murders.

[ryobserver]

@xnylder

If I recall correctly, both she and David Duchovny have said in interviews that they intentionally kept their acting low-key on X-Files, at least when confronted by aliens/freaks/other strange things. The post-production special effects were hit-or-miss, so on the first few episodes they massively overreacted to tiny things or underreacted to bizarre happenings. They ended up developing their patented “been there, seen that” look so they could be seen as reacting appropriately at all times.

This also rendered more effective the moments when Scully did rage at a bad guy or cry on Mulder’s (or, even more rarely, her mother’s) shoulder. “Beyond the Sea” and “Irresistible” are just two episodes showing Anderson can do a lot more than a stone face. Any episode when Scully “isn’t herself” for any reason is also likely to show a non-stony face; check out “Three of a Kind” or “Wetwired”.