Gillian Anderson is at Cannes for the first time as a film promoter, and she says the moment still feels new. Seated by a window overlooking the Croisette during an interview with British Vogue, the 56-year-old actor said of the experience: “This is all new to me.” Then she added: “How special.”
That debut is tied to Jane Schoenbrun’s Teenage Sex and Death at Camp Miasma, which is showing in the Un Certain Regard section. Anderson is promoting the film while also preparing for the premiere that evening, where she said she would wear a Miu Miu crystal-harnessed column gown in pale-pink satin sablé. She said the look fit the project because “it makes perfect sense for the film, which is out-there and kitsch, rebellious and young.”
For the photocall, Anderson wore a faded champagne, ankle-skimming dress surfaced with floral appliqués, paired with an 80s-style perm and a sprinkling of Chaumet jewels. She said she enjoyed the earlier Miu Miu number because it was unlike anything she would normally wear. Her style rule, she said, is simple: “No pattern, uniform in colour, with something interesting.”
The fashion talk reaches back to the uneven start of her career. Anderson said she should have begun working with stylist Martha Ward long before she did, and that there were “years, early on in my career, where I made some dire choices.” She said she was still living on unemployment cheques when she first shot to fame on The X-Files in the 1990s, and could not imagine spending money on a stylist. Instead, she said, her agents would pull in favours from designers, and she would try clothes on in her bedroom and email pictures around in search of group consensus.
“I didn’t think about fashion at all,” she said. “I didn’t think about fashion enough.” Looking back, she said she did not know whether what she wore represented who she was. “In fact, what it represented was somebody who didn’t know themselves,” she said. Working with someone changed that, she said, because it made her think she had to take fashion seriously. “It’s only by working with somebody that I thought, ‘Hang on a second, I’ve got to take this seriously,’” she said, adding that she has only recently begun to “figure it out.”
The Cannes appearance also folds into a broader run for Anderson, whose recent projects include her 2024 bestseller Want: Sexual Fantasies by Anonymous, her nootropics drinks brand G Spot, and roles in Sex Education and Teenage Sex and Death at Camp Miasma. In the new film, she plays Billy, a Norma Desmond-esque character who enters into a psychosexual relationship with Hannah Einbinder’s Kris, a “woke” filmmaker. Anderson has been to Cannes before for television work and as an ambassador for sponsor L’Oréal, but this trip marks the first time the festival has centered on her as a film face. That makes the debut more than a wardrobe moment: it is a late-career festival first for an actor who says she is still learning what her clothes, like her work, should say about her.
