Gillian Anderson’s forgotten 1992 foray into softcore porn: “This lame little film”
Every aspiring actor with big dreams has bills to pay and very little money to pay them, which is why several future superstars have a softcore porn flick on their CV. Strictly speaking, Gillian Anderson doesn’t, but the makers of one of her earliest movies tried their hardest to convince otherwise.
Before her breakthrough role in The Mask, an unknown Cameron Diaz appeared as a bondage model in She’s No Angel, while one of Sylvester Stallone’s first onscreen outings in The Party at Kitty and Stud’s was re-edited, rebranded, and re-released as The Italian Stallion to capitalise on his post-Rocky fame.
A pre-Friends Matt LeBlanc was in an episode of the erotic anthology series, The Red Shoe Diaries, and even Jackie Chan popped up in the 1975 softcore, All in the Family. The recurring theme is that they were all years away from becoming household names, and in Anderson’s case, her contributions to the skin-flick tradition are tenuous at best, unless you took the marketing as gospel.
Ironically, the two-time Golden Globe and two-time Primetime Emmy-winning actor’s most famous scene partner, X-Files co-star David Duchovny, also has a softcore background of his own, joining LeBlanc as a member of The Red Shoe Diaries alumni, but their circumstances were somewhat different.
In May 1992, a year before the classic sci-fi series premiered in the United States and rocketed her to global fame, Anderson made her feature-length debut in co-writer and director LA Puopolo’s The Turning, where she gets less than six minutes of screentime in a dramatic thriller as the ex-girlfriend of a character who returns to his hometown to thwart his parents’ impending divorce.
Make no mistake, there are sex scenes in the movie, and Anderson is seen scantily clad and briefly topless. However, when the film was released on home video in 1997 at the height of The X-Files‘ cultural popularity, she was given pride of place on the cover. Not only that, but she was billed as “Gillian ‘The X-Files‘ Anderson” on the tape, and the image showed her preparing to unbutton her blouse.
Three decades later, it was still a point of contention. “The first on-camera thing I ever did was this lame little film called The Turning, that they recently tried to re-release on DVD as a porn,” she explained. “There’s one scene in a kitchen where I make out with a boy, and afterwards, it’s clear that we’ve had sex or whatever. The number of times people bring up that fucking scene.”
In 1997, when the mismarketing scheme was in full force, Puopolo defended the choice to sell it as an Anderson-starring softcore porno. “I know it’s being sold as a sex film,” he admitted. “There’s nothing on that box that’s a lie.” As for Anderson, while she’s since begrudgingly acknowledged The Turning as her first feature-length foray, she wasn’t exactly thrilled with the way it was being sold back then, issuing a curt, “I would not count that as my first film” through her agent in response.
