Gillian Anderson Celebrates The X-Files’ 20th Anniversary With A Letter To Fans
This article is more than 2 years old
With the show celebrating its 20th anniversary this week — it premiered two decades ago yesterday, on September 10, 1993 — The X-Files has been back in the limelight again lately. There was a huge reunion panel at Comic-Con this past July. There’s been renewed talk of a possible third movie, although it’s only rumors and speculation at this point. There’s even an in-canon comic series — IDW’s The X-Files: Season 10 — that picks up where the last movie left off. Now series star Gillian Anderson, who played the skeptical Dana Scully alongside David Duchovny’s wanting-to-believe Fox Mulder, has put together a letter to the show’s fans, who helped give her the career she’s enjoyed.
You can read the full letter below, courtesy of X-Files News. You might get a little misty-eyed from nostalgia, but the mention of Duchovny’s red Speedo should shake you out of it, for one reason or another…
It’d be great to finally see another X-Files movie, but only if it’s done right. 2008’s I Want to Believe was a painfully disappointing swan song for the beloved series, slightly less tragic than Raul Julia’s final film credit being Street Fighter: The Movie. They both deserve better, but short of time travel or resurrection technology, sadly only one of them might have a chance for eventual redemption.
But is it too late? While the show has been off the air for over a decade. I have no doubt they could make a new X-Files movie happen if Fox decided it was a priority and they could make everybody’s schedules work. But it’s not like the X-Files alumni are just sitting by their phones, waiting for the call. David Duchovny has been playing charmingly fucked-up, Olympically womanizing author Hank Moody on Showtime’s Californication since 2007, with its seventh season set to premiere in 2014. While Gillian Anderson hasn’t settled into another long-term, iconic character like Duchovny has, she’s popped up in a ton of noteworthy roles over the years. most recently with a recurring role on NBC’s Hannibal and as the lead of the acclaimed British crime series The Fall, which is available for streaming on Netflix Instant.
As for series creator Chris Carter, he’s been much more MIA than the two series leads, with The X-Files marking his final broadcast series since 2002, and I Want to Believe as his last big-screen project. He’s recently emerged from his extended sabbatical inside an enormous subterranean money vault with an apocalyptic project called The After, which recently got the greenlight from Amazon Studios. (Hopefully it will fare better than Amazon’s Zombieland pilot).
At any rate, while I’d love to see another X-Files flick to send the series off right, it seems like a long-shot at this point. Honestly, at this point it seems far more likely that Fox would try to just reboot the damn thing, as much as I wish I could ignore the part of my brain that points out cynical truths like that.
In the end, maybe we should just follow Gillian Anderson’s lead and appreciate the awesomeness that The X-Files has already given us. And then maybe queue the series up on Netflix to get reacquainted with our old pals, Mulder and Scully.
