Gillian Anderson has revealed that she and her former The X-Files co-star David Duchovny have a “complex relationship.”
The actor portrayed FBI Special Agent Dana Scully across nine seasons of the science fiction drama before it came to its original end in 2002. She later reprised her role alongside Duchovny—who played Fox Mulder—for two films and the 2016 reboot.
During an appearance on the new season of the Table Manners podcast with Jessie and Lennie Ware, Anderson said while she and Duchovny are friends, their relationship has been complex.
Newsweek emailed a spokesperson for Duchovny for comment on Wednesday outside of normal business hours.
“We’ve always had quite a complex relationship. You know, when you work that intensely with somebody for such a long time, I mean we were basically married to each other,” Anderson said.
“I’ve actually listened to his podcast a fair number of times, and I think it’s good, it’s interesting. It’s interesting hearing a man talk so openly about emotional things. He really does talk about loss and guilt and feelings, you know.
“And, I feel like I’ve learned more about him listening to his podcast than from—”
Jessie Ware quipped: “Than actually when you worked with him.”
Duchovny started his podcast, Fail Better with David Duchovny, on May 7. The podcast’s description reads: “To be human is to fail—period. And not just to fail once, but to fail a lot. As the author Samuel Beckett said: ‘Fail again. Fail better.'”
There were rumors of friction between Duchovny and Anderson while The X-Files was airing in the 1990s. However, in a July 2024 interview with The Times, Duchovny said that Anderson did not influence his decision to leave the hit show in 2002.
“That was just me wanting to have a family, but also to try other things. It had kind of taken up my life,” he said.
“There was no animosity with the actual show and the people that I worked with. I am proud of the show – it was culturally central in a way that it’s very hard to do these days in a fragmented landscape.
“There’s so many lightning-strike aspects to it that I can’t help but think of it as some kind of a miracle.”
Anderson had very few credits to her name before the famous series created by Chris Carter.
These had included 1992’s The Turning movie with Raymond J. Barry, who later also appeared in The X-Files, and Class of ’96 a year later—an American drama following seven students at Havenhurst College, New England.
However, the cult series shot Anderson firmly into the spotlight and she won numerous awards for her part, including an Emmy and a Golden Globe.
Talking about her fame exploding, she told The Guardian in 2012: “It was almost too much to take in that I think I split myself—’that’ is somebody else, and I’m just going to work and raising a child and trying to do these hours without collapsing. It felt very separate from what the rest of the world thinks.”
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