In Animals, Gillian Anderson plays the person you call when a situation has gone terribly wrong. In real life, she says her friends can count on her to pick up the phone, too.
The actor joined Gayety to discuss Ben Affleck’s Netflix thriller, sharing what she has in common with her character and the connection she sees between Animals and her recent queer horror film, Teenage Sex and Death at Camp Miasma.
The Person to Call for Help
Directed by Affleck, Animals follows Los Angeles mayoral candidate Mark Kimball (Affleck) and his wife, Abigail (Kerry Washington), after their son is kidnapped. As they scramble to raise a ransom, the couple faces decisions and revelations that threaten the life they have built.
Anderson plays Dayle Burton, a fixer Mark’s campaign aide, Sam (Steven Yeun), brings in. Dayle takes control of the escalating crisis and insists on honesty from the people she is trying to help.
Asked whether her friends can rely on her to respond with similar readiness, Anderson said she is generally easy to reach.
“I mean, I’m pretty reachable in general. I respond pretty quickly to messages,” she told Gayety.
Going Beneath the Surface
Our conversation also turned to Jane Schoenbrun’s Teenage Sex and Death at Camp Miasma, of course. Anderson plays Billy, a reclusive former horror star whom Hannah Einbinder’s Kris, a filmmaker reviving a slasher franchise, seeks out. The queer film explores desire, intimacy, and self-discovery through their encounter.
“Both films are definitely about getting to the crux, getting to the root and the truth of things,” Anderson said.
Asked what interests her about stories that peel away those layers, she connected them to the play she was performing at the time. It explores “truth and illusion,” including the stories people tell themselves that are “comforting or keep us from the harsh realities of life.”
For Anderson, those questions about what people conceal connect two otherwise very different films.
“It feels like the reality of those illusions is being stripped away more and more as the years go on. And at the same time as AI is becoming part of our world, it almost feels like we’re going to be forced into that reality sooner than we even want to acknowledge. So it feels like things are speeding up really quickly, but that’s a whole other conversation that we don’t want to get into.”
Animals is now streaming on Netflix.