Gillian Anderson has put a more specific word to something she has discussed publicly for years, she identifies as pansexual.
During a new interview with The Australian, the X-Files and Sex Education star described herself as “pan, as in pansexual, as in attracted to all genders.” She also said, “In my younger years I was in relationships with women.”
Anderson has spoken about relationships with women for more than a decade and has previously described gender as largely irrelevant to attraction. Two years ago, she was still considering which label, if any, best described that part of her life.
The latest conversation arrives as Anderson promotes More, her second collection of anonymous women’s sexual fantasies, following 2024’s Want. It also comes during a run of work in which sexuality and desire have repeatedly surfaced both in her interviews and onscreen roles.
Anderson Had Already Been Circling the Pansexual Label
In a 2024 profile for The New Yorker, Anderson openly wondered how to describe her sexuality. “Am I pansexual? Am I bisexual?” she asked while reflecting on her past relationships and the way she experiences attraction.
She also explained that gender itself had not carried much importance for her when she was attracted to someone. At the time, however, she was careful not to make her experiences with women sound broader or more definitive than she felt they had been.
Anderson first discussed relationships with women publicly years earlier, including in a 2012 interview with Out. She has since returned to the subject in conversations about adolescence, attraction and the limited language she felt she had for sexuality when she was younger.
Her public work has increasingly crossed into the same territory. Sex Education, in which she played sex therapist Jean Milburn, was one project Anderson has credited with making conversations around sex and desire feel more natural in her own life.
The Conversation Arrived With Her New Book ‘More’
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More continues the project Anderson began with Want, collecting anonymous submissions from women about fantasies, desire and sexuality. Bloomsbury published the U.K. edition on September 10, while Abrams is releasing the book in the United States on September 15.
The same period has also put Anderson in Jane Schoenbrun’s Teenage Sex and Death at Camp Miasma, opposite Hannah Einbinder. The queer horror film, released theatrically in August, centers partly on desire and intimacy between their characters. Anderson has suggested that the concentrated run of projects about sex and sexuality may be nearing an end.