Gillian Anderson became an unwitting sex symbol on The X-Files. Now she’s doing something else entirely.

It’s a reasonable assumption that thousands of people around the world have imagined themselves in the situation I found myself in last week, waiting in a five-star hotel in London for Gillian Anderson to talk about sex.

Right from when Anderson first found fame playing the stern but smoldering Dana Scully on The X-Files, the actress was cast in a role she didn’t expect: sex symbol. FHM magazine, the erstwhile British men’s title, named her the sexiest woman in the world in 1998. It didn’t end there. When she began playing Stella Gibson in The Fall in 2013, a sexually liberated, no-bullshit detective, the clamor about Anderson’s sex appeal began all over again. It was a similar story when she took up the role of Dr. Jean Milburn, the sex therapist with a busy love life of her own, in Sex Education. This is a person who, culture decided a long time ago, was simply desirable—someone at whom we should feel free to look, and to fantasize about.

Now, almost 30 years on from that FHM accolade, Anderson has become a curator, rather than an object, of sexual fantasies. Want, a new book released next week, is a collection of anonymous fantasies written by women from all over the world, selected and introduced by Anderson. When she arrived in the hotel room, looking cool in a cream bomber jacket slung over a long red dress she was wearing for a TV spot just before, she told me that getting to be in the driver’s seat in this way was part of the point, for her. “When I was much younger, and being told I was a sex symbol,” she said, “it felt very other. It always felt ridiculous, because they weren’t talking about me, and people’s responses had nothing to do with me.” This book was one way in which she can “take control of that narrative, take ownership of it, and use it as a platform.”

The concept behind Want will sound familiar to anybody who knows the infamous 1973 book My Secret Garden by Nancy Friday, which directly inspired it. Friday, a journalist, wanted to know what women fantasized about sexually, and put together a compendium of responses from people she knew and further responders she sought out through newspaper and magazine advertisements.

Anderson had flicked through My Secret Garden when she was preparing for Sex Education, she said, but the idea for Want was hatched by Anderson’s literary agent, initially. It makes sense for Anderson to be the figurehead of a book like this. Playing Jean Milburn ushered in something of a new act in her career and in her public profile, as an icon of sex positivity rather than just sexiness. It’s a role she’s embraced, posting shots of things like suggestively shaped mushrooms and sea creatures on her Instagram, hashtagged #penisoftheday, and wearing a dress patterned with vulvas to the 2024 Golden Globes.

During the time I spent with her, Anderson talked about the book and about sex generally with an air of openness and unflappable professionalism. I think I could be forgiven for feeling like I was in the room with Milburn, rather than Gillian Anderson, sat as we were in armchairs artfully slanted toward each other in a sleek but neutral hotel room, not so far from a therapist’s office in vibe. She is clear, to the point of insistence, both in our interview and in her introductory essays in the book itself, that she is not an expert in this field. “I’m not a therapist. I’m not a sexual therapist. I’m an actor, and I will continue to be an actor, first and foremost,” she said. Then she corrected herself: “Well, second and foremost, because, first and foremost, I’m a mother.”

Friday’s book is certainly the more shocking. It touches on more taboo topics (I consider myself a cosmopolitan woman with a strong stomach, but I found the incest and bestiality sections challenging, to say nothing of the section titled “Black men.”) Want is tamer, frankly. But it is also wider-ranging. Anderson’s publisher, Bloomsbury, put out a global call for contributors, and received 800,000 words of responses. Anderson read them all. The entries are anonymous but do include some identifying details beneath them: nationality and/or ethnicity, background, income bracket, sexuality, and religious beliefs. Not, however, age, which strikes me as a shame. I for one would be interested to know if women in their 20s and women in their 60s are horny for the same things.

But despite the sensible lack of, say, idle imaginings about having sex with animals or family members, Want is not PG-rated in comparison to My Secret Garden. “Cocks” and “cunts” and “cum” abound. And it does feel like a relatively unvarnished look at the enormous range in the private fantasy lives of the world’s women. There’s a woman in Ecuador who wants a penis to play with, a lesbian who thinks about a train carriage full of men having sex with her, a German virgin fantasizing about having sex with a couple, sex with teachers, bricklayers, burglars, bikers, club strangers, priests, other people’s brothers and husbands and everyone in between.

When Friday’s book came out, it was met with outrage from some, delight from others, and received that curious accolade of the racy book: being banned in Ireland. It was also a bestseller. What Want cannot do is what My Secret Garden did: cause a little earthquake in the public imagination. Put simply, we see more sex these days.

But that doesn’t mean Want wasn’t worth doing. One of the things that Anderson was surprised to find hadn’t really changed in the 50-odd years since Friday released her book was the persistent sense of shame. “Whether it’s Sex Education or Euphoria or 50 Shades of Grey or the billion-dollar porn industry, it’s such a part of our narrative to watch and engage with extreme sexual content,” she said, “that I guess I had assumed that individuals would be more open about their own thoughts, feelings, experiences, fantasies.” What she saw time and again in the letters was people saying they could never communicate these desires to their partners, or felt guilty for having them. It’s one thing that in many ways women still live under the kosh of the patriarchy, and it’s another that we feel under that kosh even in our most private imagined lives.

Anderson has contributed her own anonymous sexual fantasy to this collection, something she found surprisingly difficult. “I really struggled to just—you know,” she said, pausing, not wanting to give any clues that might help someone work out which piece is hers. “Certain words! Even though they may roll off your tongue, so to speak, in your head, writing them down was really challenging. It felt somehow dirtier on the page than it did in my head.”

It’s an interesting exercise, taking something so inherently private as a sexual fantasy and putting it into writing for anybody to read. I wondered aloud whether something was lost in giving voice to a sexual fantasy, made too real or concrete. She saw it a little differently.

“Certainly part of fantasy is that it is our own private imaginings, and we have a right to keep that private,” she said. “But I think that when one gets used to being that honest with oneself and being able to communicate that, of course, that will end up translating into other areas of your life, because there is a certain degree of self-reflection. One starts to ask oneself, am I getting what I want and I need elsewhere? Is my life on my terms?”

Anderson finally came to see sexual fantasy as a kind of creative authorship. “We are the directors, we are the orchestrators, we are the designers. We set the scene, we are in control of everything that happens and who’s involved.” For any actor, but especially one like Anderson who has felt keenly what it is like to be told by others that you embody sex for other people, curating a collection like Want feels like a powerful turning of the tables.