Gillian Anderson confirmed in a recent interview that she was offered half the pay of her co-star David Duchovny to participate in Fox's revival of "The X-Files."
"I'm surprised more [interviewers] haven't brought that us because it's the truth," Anderson told The Daily Beast. "Especially in this climate of women talking about the reality of [unequal pay] in this business, I think it's important that it gets heard and voiced. It was shocking to me, given all the work that I had done in the past to get us to be fairly. I worked really hard toward that and finally got somewhere with it."
"The X-Files" actress first brought up the pay discrepancy in an interview with The Hollywood Reporter earlier this month. She originally shied away from the reboot until the episode total was brought down to six.
"It wasn't until we were at a small number of episodes that I could even have the conversation," Anderson told THR. "Once we agreed, negotiations happened somewhere else. There's no point in dealing with my side [first] because, as usual, they come to me with half of what they want to offer David."
In the end, Anderson and Duchovny were both paid the same to reprise their "X-Files" roles as Dana Scully and Fox Mulder, sources confirmed to THR.
"The Fall" star didn't attain equal pay with Duchovny on the original series until three years into it. She also described to The Daily Beast how the studio required her to stand slightly behind her male co-star and never step side-by-side with him.
"I can only imagine that at the beginning, they wanted me to be the sidekick," Anderson said about the spacing rule. "Or that, somehow, maybe it was enough of a change just to see a woman having this kind of intellectual repartee with a man on camera, and surely the audience couldn't deal with actually seeing them walk side by side!"
"The X-Files" reboot will premiere on Sunday, Jan. 24 at 10 p.m. before settling into its regular timeslot on Monday, Jan. 25 at 8 p.m. on Fox.
