Gillian Anderson Was Asked If She Spoke To Margaret Thatcher About Her Role On “The Crown”
Exactly the Margaret Thatcher you’re thinking of. The woman who died in 2013 at the age of 87 years old. Apparently, that little piece of Thatcher biography trivia hadn’t made its way into the brain of one journalist in the press room at the Emmy Awards last night. But maybe that journalist was all mixed up because they got confused and distracted by Gillian Anderson’s American accent. They wouldn’t have been the only ones who were seemingly afflicted by such last night.
Gillian won her second Emmy Award (the first was in 1997 for The X-Files) when she took home the award for Supporting Actress in a Drama Series for her portrayal of Margaret Thatcher in The Crown. To be fair, most of the heavy lifting was done by that giant high-density wig she wore, but congrats to her! She beat out two other actresses nominated from The Crown, four from The Handmaid’s Tale, and one from Lovecraft Country. She was extremely happy when she accepted her award live from London, where she and the rest of the cast and crew from The Crown hung out and watched the show. Gillian also looked really good, even if all those dangly little metal odds and ends tied to the top of that dress kind of look it was designed by the House of Blair Witch.
Gillian lived in the UK for a while as a child, and she currently lives in London. I guess a whole lot of people were expecting her to approach that microphone and say, “Blimey, wots all this? Nice lil’ decoration from the Yankee telly academy, innit.” She didn’t, and they were shocked!
GILLIAN ANDERSON IS AMERICAN WTF?!?! I’m so mind blown rn. I thought she was British this whole time omg.
— Alexandra Jaymes (@asjaymes96) September 20, 2021
It's very very weird hearing Gillian Anderson with an American accent, I was very thrown😂🙃
— Molly💼🍼 (@missmollybruton) September 20, 2021
But as several people pointed out, Gillian has been known to throw between an American accent and a British one. And she was born in Chicago, left for a bit, returned to the US when she was 11, and went back and forth between the US and the UK in the summer for the remainder of her youth. Gillian addressed her accents earlier this year after she accepted a Golden Globe Award for her role in The Crown. According to her, it’s not weird to flip between the two accents, as she has spent significant amounts of time in her formative years in both places.
As for the Margaret Thatcher flub, after Gillian won, she retreated to a press room (this time a digital press room, since she was not in Los Angeles with many of the other winners and journalists hoping to score some material). A reporter asked Gillian the following:
“First question, have you talked to [Margaret Thatcher] about this at all, and secondly, why do you think it has taken America so long to get a female leader?”
Gillian, deeply confused, stammered that, no, she had not spoken to Margaret Thatcher prior to putting on the wig and stepping on set.
reporter asks if Gillian Anderson has talked to Margaret Thatcher about her role in The Crown. this is like a Fred Willard character. pic.twitter.com/JLlAafbpBV
— Shawn Hils (@ShawnHils) September 20, 2021
That was very kind of Gillian not to call out that reporter, because wow, that was a deeply misinformed question. But with that being said, I wish we could have a supercut of every single question asked by that reporter. If that wonderfully loopy lady didn’t know that the extremely famous politician Margaret Thatcher was long dead, was else might she not know? I really need to know how her Q&A with Kate Winslet went. “Kate, you played the Mayor of Easttown. But shouldn’t the mayor have just hired detectives to solve the murder? It’s not a mayor’s job to find killers! That’s dangerous!”
Pic: CBS