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‘We’re not as open about sex as we imagine’: Gillian Anderson on pleasure, powerful women, and collecting secret fantasies

When the actor asked women to share their erotic secrets for a new book, she found herself rethinking her own relationship with desire - and deciding to have more fun

I had a surreal experience in 1996 when I was voted world’s sexiest woman by readers of FHM magazine … It felt so preposterous to me On the subject of straight women, there is a lot of this sort of thing: “My deep-seated fantasy, the one to which I touch myself after a warm cup of camomile and milk to bless my dreams, is for aman to be indelibly – and entirely ordinarily – nice to me.” And this: “I would do anything to fuck my best friend’s brother.” OK! This book will provide comfort not just by offering readers a chance to find fantasies similar to their own, but via the inescapably human experience of thinking, “God, I thought I was weird, but check out this bird and her crazy inner life.” Or as Anderson puts it, the project is designed “to encourage different ways of looking at how different but the same we are, depending on our backgrounds and religion. It’s good for my boys, and for other women to see that I’m adding things to my life right at the point when some people think I should be subtracting I tell Anderson it strikes me that, at 56, she is on an amazing career jag; hugely in demand as an actor, playing recent high-profile roles such as Emily Maitlis in the Netflix movie Scoop, and generally giving the impression she has inherited the Earth.

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