The “horrendous review” that almost made Gillian Anderson quit acting
Some actors claim that they don’t read reviews, which is almost certainly untrue in 99.99% of cases, but it does speak to the fact that being an actor requires tough skin.
Reviews can be scathing, especially now that the internet has allowed every film watcher to be a published critic, and an actor can spend months investigating, discovering, and mastering a character, only to have their work torn to shreds within minutes of the credits rolling at the premiere. In the grand scheme of things, it’s a pretty minor hardship, but it must hurt, nonetheless.
Gillian Anderson has never come across as particularly delicate; on the contrary, she projects a kind of magnetic authority that has led her to play the types of characters who command every room that they’re in, whether it’s Scully in The X-Files or Margaret Thatcher in The Crown.
Just like anyone else, though, she is susceptible to self-doubt when confronted with a brutal performance review, and in her case, the most crippling moment came in 2000, when she appeared in Terence Davies’ adaptation of Edith Wharton’s The House of Mirth, playing the Gilded Age protagonist Lily Bart.
Anderson was tasked with portraying the spectacular fall from grace of a society beauty whose rebelliousness and lack of a husband eventually turn her into a pariah, and the reviews for the film were overwhelmingly positive, with critics championing Anderson’s performance as an Oscar-worthy revelation.
It’s actually quite difficult to find any negative commentary unless you turn to the New York Post (why would you?), where she was called a poorly cast Julianne Moore knockoff, and even that doesn’t seem particularly nasty, though, especially considering the source.
Despite the avalanche of rapturous praise, “one particularly horrendous review” of The House of Mirth made Anderson consider giving up acting altogether. In an interview with The Guardian in 2024, the actor revealed that it had been “a real eye opener for me, a rude awakening to the fickleness of the industry”.
Luckily, she did not go through with the urge to quit her profession, and while it was her first major film role, after already having earned widespread praise for The X Files, it seemed to be a tough reality check about Hollywood.
Regardless, she stayed away from leading movie roles, finding a home in the ever-expanding world of prestige TV, with award-winning turns in Bleak House and The Crown, playing the ferociously competent detective Stella Gibson in The Fall, a much-loved run as a sex therapist in the buzzy Netflix series Sex Education and she also found acclaim in the theatre, playing such daunting roles as Blanche DuBois in A Streetcar Named Desire and Margo Channing in All About Eve, picking up multiple Olivier Award nominations and an OBE along the way.
In other words, she might not have embraced the fickleness of movies after The House of Mirth, but she more than proved that one reviewer wrong, whoever they were.
