New Delhi: Actor Gillian Anderson has revealed that she is pansexual in a recent interview with The Australian while promoting her new book, More.
Interviewer Nikki Gemmell, in the article, says that Anderson “tells me she’s pan, as in pansexual, as in attracted to all genders”.
Two years ago, Anderson was still considering whether the word described her.
“Now, at the age of 55, I am thinking, Oh, am I pansexual? Am I bisexual?” she had said in 2024.
Pansexuality generally refers to attraction to people regardless of their gender.
The question came up while Anderson was working on Want, a collection of anonymous accounts of women’s sexual fantasies. At the time, she was careful not to overstate her experiences with women because she did not want to claim an identity that might not be hers.
Also Read: Gillian Anderson opens up about ‘secretive and illicit’ same-sex relationship in high school
Dated women before
Anderson had already spoken about having relationships with women. In 2012, she said she had been in a long relationship with a girl while she was in high school and had dated other women later.
She spoke about the school relationship in more detail last month.
“It felt secretive and illicit and wrong, and we had to hide,” Anderson said. A boyfriend later found out and broke up with her.
“But I definitely felt I didn’t have the language for it,” she said. Anderson added that she was not sure she had ever seen her later relationships with women as potentially permanent.
“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 said. Anderson is in a long-term relationship with playwright and screenwriter Peter Morgan.
More follows Want, which was published in 2024 and became a bestseller. Both books collect anonymous submissions from women about their sexual fantasies. Anderson said her work on the books grew out of playing sex therapist Jean Milburn in the Netflix series Sex Education (2019-2023).
(Edited by Stela Dey)