Actress Gillian Anderson, best known for her role as FBI Special Agent Dana Scully on The X-Files, has identified as pansexual, describing an attraction to both sexes regardless of gender identity. Anderson made the comments in an interview with The Australian, according to reporting by Breitbart News.
“In my younger years, I was in relationships with women,” Anderson told the outlet. She suggested her understanding of her own sexuality evolved over time, influenced in part by hearing other women describe their experiences.
Anderson, who has been a fixture on television and in film for more than three decades, spoke candidly about how she approaches romance now. “I’m not a big flirter. I don’t put it out there very much,” she said. She added that she hears from many women in her age group who are, in her words, rediscovering their sensuality and their desire for sex.
“It certainly sounds like they’re in the dating field. That they’re having a lot of fun, a lot of opportunities, but also being approached on these apps by much younger men,” she added.
A Life Partner, Regardless of Gender
Anderson’s comments to The Australian echo remarks she made in an earlier interview with the Sunday Times, in which she described dating a girl when she was younger. At the time, she said, she did not have the language to classify her sexuality.
“It felt secretive and illicit and wrong and we had to hide,” she recalled, per Breitbart’s account of the Sunday Times interview. “Later on, I had a boyfriend who found out and broke up with me.”
She went on to describe other relationships with women that followed. “Even later on when I had other relationships [with women] I’m not sure I ever thought of them as being potentially forever,” she said. “The person I consider my life partner happens to be male, but I think I would feel the same way if it were a woman,” she continued. “I’d feel, ‘This is my life partner.'”
Anderson shares a daughter with her ex-husband Clyde Klotz and two sons with her former partner Mark Griffiths.
Earlier Disclosures
The actress first spoke publicly about past relationships with women in a 2012 interview with Out magazine. In that conversation, she described a relationship with a girl during high school, followed by a relationship with what she called a punk rock drug addict, and then a relationship with someone significantly older than her.
“Everything that that kind of anarchistic attitude brings — the inappropriate behavior it leads to — was how I chose to be in the world at that time, which was, you know, not what people did,” she said at the time, as recounted by Breitbart.
Anderson’s latest remarks add her name to a growing list of public figures who have discussed identifying as pansexual, a term that refers to attraction to people regardless of their gender identity or biological sex. She has not framed the disclosure as a formal announcement, instead addressing it as part of a broader conversation about dating, desire, and relationships later in life.
The X-Files, which ran for nine seasons beginning in 1993 and later returned for revival seasons, made Anderson one of the most recognizable actors of the 1990s. She has since worked steadily in television and film, including roles in The Fall, Sex Education, and The Crown, for which she won an Emmy. She has generally kept her personal life out of the spotlight, making her comments to The Australian and the Sunday Times notable for their relative candor.
A Quiet Disclosure
Anderson’s comments arrived without a press tour or a staged announcement. In the interview, she characterized herself as someone who does not broadcast her romantic life, a description consistent with how she has handled past disclosures — offering details when asked, rather than volunteering them unprompted.
Her description of women her age rediscovering desire, and of the particular texture of dating in midlife, reads less like a statement of identity than an observation about a moment she sees happening around her. She placed herself adjacent to that world rather than at its center.
The interview also reflects how the vocabulary around sexual orientation has shifted over the course of Anderson’s career. When she was in high school, she said, she had no framework for what she was experiencing. Decades later, she uses the word pansexual — a term that barely circulated publicly during The X-Files’ original run.
Anderson’s remarks to Out in 2012 and to the Sunday Times touched on the same theme: relationships she described as hidden, and a sense that they were not treated as lasting. Her comments to The Australian extend that thread, framing her current partnership in terms that, she suggested, would not change based on the gender of the person involved.
Representatives for Anderson did not issue any additional statement beyond the published interview. Breitbart News reported her comments, drawing on both The Australian interview and the earlier Sunday Times and Out magazine conversations.
The disclosure places Anderson among a set of established performers who have addressed their sexuality in interviews rather than through formal public statements. For an actress whose most famous character was defined in part by professional restraint and personal privacy, the tone of her remarks — measured, retrospective, without fanfare — may be as notable as their content.
Source: www.breitbart.com — https://www.breitbart.com/entertainment/2026/09/14/x-files-star-gillian-anderson-identifies-as-pansexual-after-dating-men-and-women/