Gillian Anderson is contemplating that double-edged sword called fame. "When I'm at home, scraping food off the floor and cleaning up after the dog, I wonder why this person is calling me to do an interview for some magazine.

"It is strange," concedes the flame-tressed star of The X-Files. "But as long as I keep honest about who I am, as long as I remember that I'm still responsible for my daughter [Piper] and for cleaning up dog crap, I'll be OK. That's where the reality is based and fostered. If I were leading a very different life and had cooks and everything, it would feel less real. I think people's problems start when they hire somebody to clean up the dog crap and forget what those experiences, that reality, is like."

It's a good thing that Anderson has her feet on the ground, for The X-Files phenomenon shows no signs of abating. The series' ratings, remarkably, continue to rise year after year. The X-Files: Fight the Future performed well, and a sixth season of the exploits of FBI Special Agents Dana Scully and Fox Mulder (David Duchovny) gets underway November 1. "It sometimes feels like we've done 10 seasons," Anderson jokes, but with a serious edge. "It doesn't necessarily get easier to do, but the years go by faster, I think, because we know what we're doing and how to do it. The first and second year seemed like they lasted forever. The last few years have gone by relatively quickly.

"When I read the pilot, I was struck by how unlike a TV script it was, and also by how complicated and interesting the relationship was between Mulder and Scully. More than anything else, I think that her intelligence and strengh in standing up to Mulder and her confidence about expressing her beliefs in front of somebody who was being touted - in terms of his work at the FBI - as being near God appealed to me."

Agent on Film

While it's common knowledge that Anderson and Duchovny don't socialize off camera, there's no denying their chemistry. Fortunately for the actors and X-philes alike, the chemistry is practically automatic; it just happens when the roll. "Really, the chemistry between us is beyond our control. We're very thankful for it, and we don't take it for granted. There's nothing really to build anymore," Anderson notes. "It's there, and our characters shift and change as the time passes. We come together and we fall apart, just like David and I do. What happens between Scully and Mulder is in the scripts. There's really not much that David and I have to do now because we've been playing the characters for so long."

But what impact will the events depicted in the film-particularly the tantalizing bee-interrupted kiss - have on the series? On Scully and Mulder's relationship? "At the film's end, she basically said, 'Let's move forward. We've got work to do,"' the actress explains. "From the beginning, I've thought that there's just no room in the show for us to be romantically involved. There's just no time. [If we were to get involved], it would have to be addressed at some point. And when could we address it when we're in the middle of saving people's lives? It's like, 'Did you turn off the oven when we left the house?' It would ruin the show. I don't think people would be as interested in it anymore if we actually consummated the relationship, because half of the attraction is in the tension generated by leaving it unconsummated."

Focusing on the film for a while, there's the issue of whether or not the experience of making The X-Files was truly cinematic or more like working on a bloated episode. "It did feel like one big, special episode. The biggest difference was that we took much more time with the movie than we do on the show. Movies just take longer," she says. "We did fewer pages a day. We would do an average of two pages a day on the movie, as opposed to the five to nine pages a day on the series. That makes a huge difference in the amount of dialogue that we had to memorize and say. So the movie wasn't as time consuming. We had a lot more time off. A movie set is also a much more casual, relaxing environment. It's more human way to work. We did the movie right after the forth season and right before the fifth season, but even so, the difference between doing the show and the film was drastic. While doing the film, I felt like I was on vacation." The film also found Anderson, alternately, both frantically active and totally immobile, as the script not only called for several scenes of breathless running and/or fleeing from exploding buildings, buzzing bees and pursuing helicopters, but also for shots of an alienated, in-stasis Scully encased in green goo, with tubes running out of her mouth. "I've actually gotten a lot more down and dirty and physical on the show, but because we were doing this as a movie, I was physically active for several days doing one scene. You get a little beat up doing those scenes, but they're kind of fun," she says. "For the scene in that [casing], I got dunked. I was literally in a vat full of slime and water. I had stuff going in my nose and my mouth. So that was pretty down and dirty. Let's just say I've been a happier camper, but it looks convincing in the movie. I think the whole movie is pretty convincing."

The build-up to the film's release generated intense excitement among fans, a good many of whom stopped at nothing to ferret out classified information before the picture reached theaters. Part of the impetus to know, no doubt, had to do with the secrecy surrounding every aspect of the enterprise. Wouldn't you want to know every secret about a show that practically wallows in its myriad enigmas and conspiracies? Series creator Chris Carter generated fake scripts to throw people off. Real scripts were produced in such a way that they couldn't be duplicated. Such wildly paranoid secrecy backfired on Godzilla, another 1998 event movie, when the film failed to deliver and its secrets proved mere empty promises. Did Anderson ever worry that the X-Files feature might not merit the meticulous subterfuge? "I couldn't even begin to worry about that," she responds. "My mind was not in that place. I'm sure there were people on the production side who were concerned. I don't know if I would use the word 'worried,' because everyone had a great deal of faith in the film that we were making. It was just not that big a concern to me. We did the best job we could have done. The movie looks fantastic and I think it's very good, and we're still going to do the series. So the stakes weren't as high for me [on the movie] as they were for other people."

Transcript from GAWS