It’s a reasonable assumption that thousands of people around the world have imagined themselves in the situation I found myself in last week, waiting in a five-star hotel in London for Gillian Anderson to talk about sex.
Right from when Anderson first found fame playing the stern but smoldering Dana Scully on The X-Files, the actress was cast in a role she didn’t expect: sex symbol. FHM magazine, the erstwhile British men’s title, named her the sexiest woman in the world in 1998. It didn’t end there. When she began playing Stella Gibson in The Fall in 2013, a sexually liberated, no-bullshit detective, the clamor about Anderson’s sex appeal began all over again. It was a similar story when she took up the role of Dr. Jean Milburn, the sex therapist with a busy love life of her own, in Sex Education. This is a person who, culture decided a long time ago, was simply desirable—someone at whom we should feel free to look, and to fantasize about.
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