Gillian Anderson Is Open to Returning to THE X-FILES Under Certain Conditions

Gillian Anderson has said on multiple occasions that she was done with The X-Files and that Season 11 would be her final season. She previously said, "This is it for me. I’m really serious. I have so much respect for these guys and I have respect for Scully and I have respect for David [Duchovny] and it’s really sad, but I’m finished and that’s the end of that."

Now, in a recent interview with Variety, she seems like she is actually open to returning to the role of Agent Scully, but it would have to be under certain conditions. When asked if she would return to the franchise, she explained:

“It just feels like such an old idea. I’ve done it, I did it for so many years, and it also ended on such an unfortunate note,’ referring to Scully’s pregnancy reveal. ‘In order to even begin to have that conversation [about another season] there would need to be a whole new set of writers and the baton would need to be handed on for it to feel like it was new and progressive. So yeah, it’s very much in the past.”

So, while she is open to it, if it does happen, it sounds like it has to be done in a way that will take her character out of the franchise completely. This is something that she just wants to move on from. As for jumping on board the project in the first place she explained:

“I don’t think it was as clear-cut in my mind as being, ‘Oh, this is a feminist character.’ I think that it was more of just, ‘This is a woman that I haven’t seen before on television, and she’s so unique.'”

She went on to open up about what it was like for her when she joined the project and the sexist views of Hollywood at the time:

“I was expected to walk behind [co-star David Duchovny] when [our characters] walked up to the front doors of the people we were investigating. There were things that I rebelled against.”

Good for her! The X-Files creator Chris Carter previously apologized for the plot threads that were left unresolved in Season 11, knowing that Anderson wasn't interested in returning for a Season 12. Carter shared:

“Skinner, Mulder, Scully, and William’s stories are still unresolved. I’m sorry I wasn’t able to do that. Being that Gillian has decided to move on with her career, we certainly couldn’t do Mulder and Scully again. But that’s not to say there isn’t another way to do the X-Files. And so right now I think the future is unwritten.”

In case you don’t remember, in Season 11 it was revealed that William, who we believed to be Scully and Mulder's son, was actually the result of the Cigarette-Smoking Man drugging Scully and impregnating her.

I’d like to see The X-Files continue in some way as it would be nice to get some closure on the story and the unresolved threads from the last season. Last I heard, Carter was working on developing an animated X-Files project.