She might be best remembered as Dana Scully, the level-headed love of science fiction fanatics everywhere, but Gillian Anderson is more than just a beautiful, charismatic actor — she's an unstoppable force of nature.
So today (August 9), we celebrate Gillian's birthday the only way we know how: by admitting that she is better than every single one of us:
Every single time she eyerolled the aliens of "The X-Files" into oblivion.
Her skepticism knows no limits.
That time she lied about her age and it totally worked.
Anderson was only 24 years old when she auditioned for "The X-Files," and only got her foot in the door by telling the producers she was 27. Once she read for the part, though, she completely swept showrunner Chris Carter away. Meanwhile, I am 26 years old and it's a miracle if I can find two socks that match in the morning.
That time she insisted she could eat more chicken nuggets than you.
As she revealed during a 2014 Reddit AMA. The woman does not even eat chicken nuggets.
That time she DEMANDED equal pay on "The X-Files."
In the first season of "The X-Files," the studio wanted Anderson to always be a few steps behind David Duchovny on camera, so it's no surprise that they only wanted to pay her half as much as her male co-star. Anderson wasn't about to take that lying down, though, and eventually closed the wage gap with him after a few years — only for Fox to turn around and offer her half of his pay again when the show was revived this year. Don't worry, she got what she was owed the second time around, but not without making a few headlines along the way.
That time she had to start a Tumblr account and gave it an amazing title.
Maz Kanata' gonna be so pissed.
That time she casually outed herself in a magazine interview.
Technically Anderson doesn't identify as gay, but she was once in a relationship with another girl during high school, she told Out Magazine in 2012. “If I had thought I was 100% gay, would it have been a different experience for me?” she said. "Would it have been a bigger deal if shame had been attached to it and all those things that become huge life-altering issues for youngsters in that situation? It’s possible that my attitude around it came, on some level, from knowing that I still liked boys.”
“I wouldn’t discount it,” she told The Telegraph a few years later on the subject of future same-sex relationships. “I did it before and I’m not closed to that idea. To me a relationship is about loving another human being; their gender is irrelevant.”
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