Gillian Anderson has identified as pansexual in a new interview with The Australian.
The actor, 58, told interviewer Nikki Gemmell that she is “pan, as in pansexual, as in attracted to all genders.” Anderson, who won an Emmy for playing Margaret Thatcher in The Crown, has been open about past relationships with women but had not previously used the label.
She traced the evolution of her understanding to a 2024 conversation with The New Yorker, where she questioned her own identity aloud. “Now, at the age of fifty-five, I am thinking, Oh, am I pansexual? Am I bisexual?”
Anderson described one of her first romances as an “older girl in high school,” a teenage relationship she kept hidden. “It felt secretive and illicit and wrong and we had to hide,” she explained in a previous Sunday Times interview. She added that she did not identify as gay at the time, telling the newspaper: “But I definitely felt I didn’t have the language for it.”
That sense of uncertainty persisted into later years. “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 in the new Australian interview.
Her current partnership helped clarify her outlook. Anderson has been in a relationship with Peter Morgan, creator of The Crown, since they met in 2016 through actor Vanessa Kirby. The couple split in 2020 but sparked reconciliation rumors when spotted together at the 2024 Emmys. “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 told Gemmell. “I’d feel, ‘This is my life partner.'”
Anderson was previously married twice, first to The X-Files director Clyde Klotz and later to filmmaker Julian Ozanne.
The conversation with The Australian also turned physical. Anderson named forearms as her favorite feature on men, declaring that “nice hands and forearms can be the sexiest things in the world.” Her preference for women ran different: “lips, buttocks … the clavicle.”
She described herself frankly as “a very sexual being” while noting she keeps it understated. “I’m not a big flirter. I don’t put it out there very much,” she said, adding that she hears “of a lot of women around our age who are rediscovering their sensuality.”
Anderson has built a career on candor. She recently criticized Hollywood’s persistent gender pay gap on Josh Smith’s Great Chat Show, recounting a specific offer that fell far below a male co-star’s. “It wasn’t until, you know, being offered a huge percentage less than male co-star that I suddenly thought actually I need to keep talking about this because it’s still an issue,” she said. “And I didn’t realize that and I’ve been pushing it away because it felt like old news, but actually it is still in our present.”
Anderson continues to balance multiple projects across television and film.