It’s no secret that Gillian Anderson, 56, is a compelling force of nature and a commanding presence as she slips into the on-screen shoes of high-profile women – whether she is playing first lady Eleanor Roosevelt (The First Lady), former British prime minister Margaret Thatcher (The Crown) or BBC journalist Emily Maitlis (Scoop).
Anderson made her film debut in The Turning in 1992 and took on her breakthrough role as FBI agent Dana Scully on The X-Files a year later. Today, she is quite selective when it comes to choosing parts, as her perspective has inherently shifted after being in the business for over three decades. Now, she only wants to take on roles that are particularly meaningful to her.
“I feel like I’m more in control of the types of things I want to spend my time doing than maybe I have been in the past,” she told Zoomer in a recent interview. “I am probably even more picky and discerning about the things that I choose than maybe I have been in the past just because, how many more years am I going to be doing this … if I’ve got 20 years ahead of me?”
Her latest role is one such film that moved her deeply. The Salt Path, based on Raynor Winn’s autobiographical book of the same name, is a deeply inspiring true story about middle-aged couple Ray (Anderson) and Moth (Jason Isaacs, 61) who, after losing their home and livelihood, impulsively set out on a 630-mile walk along the southwest English coast – while also coping with the recent diagnosis of Moth’s terminal neurodegenerative disease.
The Salt Path made its world premiere at TIFF this year, which Anderson and Isaacs both attended.
Anderson had read the book and she hadn’t thought of it as a love story until she started working on the film. It is then she felt more attuned with Ray’s journey. “I think I was so caught up in her trajectory, both the grief and the resentment and the fury and the injustice and the extra challenge of Moth’s diagnosis that it wasn’t until we started working on it and I realized along the way, the degree to which it’s their journey because of their love and commitment to each other. And how much they are still very much in love that that is as much as anything is what carries them through.”
The Chicago-born actor knows how to build an intimate portrayal of a character. She recalls that Ray is quite guarded as a person and hard to read. She isn’t sure if that’s someone she’s always been or had to become because of the journey and trauma and sharing an intimate part of their lives with the world. While she wanted to play Ray embodying those elements, she didn’t want to “close myself from the audience being able to go on that journey with me.
“It was a fine balance between where she gets vulnerable, where she softens, where she’s carrying the burden and the weight of what’s just happened, and also the fact that now you know her husband may be leaving her soon, and the weight of that and parenthood without money or shelter and all of that. Those backpacks that they are carrying are a real metaphor for what they’ve been laden with.”
It’s not often that we actually see a middle-aged couple in their 50s going through the worst of times and recapturing their love for one another. The Salt Path does so intimately, sensitively and in a deeply empathetic way that invites audiences to go on that journey with them.
Anderson, meanwhile, knows that stories focussed on women in their 50s, post-menopause, are rarely told or explored on the screen in today’s youth-obsessed culture. “The fact is, we’re all going to end up, if we’re lucky, to be in our 50s and beyond and so it seems it’s so funny to talk about, because it feels like I don’t know what percentage of the population is actually the age of these characters. And yet, there’s something unusual about the fact that a story like this has made it to the screen.”
She continued: “You never know when you follow your heart and want to do small films, indie projects, passion projects, the degree to which anyone will relate or want to take the time – particularly in this day and age when so few people are actually going to the movie theatre – to sit and watch something that you know requires a bit of a degree of patience and risk.”
But for Anderson, this was an important story to tell. “It had moved me so much that I really felt like I had to do it, and really wanted to do that journey and also to understand more and to be able to put myself in a place of compassion because this can happen to anyone.”
The Salt Path is screening at TIFF on Friday, September 13 and Saturday September 14. Visit the TIFF website for screening and ticket information.
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