Gillian Anderson really did not like that last season of X-Files

It’s been six years now since the second revival season of The X-Files ended, not with a bang, but with a definitive cast pronouncement: Gillian Anderson wasn’t coming back, she’d probably never be coming back, and she was done with Dana Scully for good.

Now, Anderson has finally gotten into the motivation between that pronouncement, which shuttered any further plans creator Chris Carter might have had to keep the long-running sci-fi show going even further, and she did it in conversation with the one person on the planet who could match her for “quitting The X-Files” experience: David Duchovny. Per Consequence, Anderson went on Duchovny’s Fail Better podcast this week and the conversation inevitably turned to Anderson’s decision, which she announced ahead of the show’s 11th season premiere back in 2018. Among other things, the pair discussed the fact that Anderson didn’t necessarily run her opinion past any of her collaborators on the series, noting that, after she made the announcement, “It was the first time that I got the sense of like, oh, am I the only one that thinks that [the show won’t go on]. Everybody else seems really disappointed that I’ve just declared that.”

Duchovny—who, as the pair acknowledged, also ditched the show once without talking to Anderson beforehand—said that “It felt a little bit like, ‘Okay, I’m done with you guys,’ you know? I know that’s not what you meant rationally.” (Anderson, meanwhile, noted that she’d actually intended to quit the show herself when Duchovny quit at the end of its seventh season, but then, “They started talking about, well, if you stay on, you can actually make some good money,” with Duchovny jokingly suggesting that the attitude then became, “Well, fuck him.”)

More interestingly, Anderson talked about why she didn’t want to come back after season 11, the show’s second revival season, and which generally has a pretty dismal critical reputation. Anderson’s specific objections came down to the show’s growing obsession with Scully as a mom, an idea that had floated around in the background of the series for many seasons, but got a ton of focus in that last season, with the hunt for her long-lost son William. (There’s like a million qualifiers you have to apply to encompass the nature of that relationship, which involved implantation, abductions, genetic manipulation, psychic powers, etc., but that’s the basic gist.) “It felt like Scully’s trajectory was no longer one of strength and agency,” Anderson said of her arc on the series. “It felt like it was beholden to an old idea of what a woman is… Literally all she could talk about was William and finding William. That’s literally a one-track song.” (It presumably didn’t help that the season ended by revealing she was pregnant again.)

“I wasn’t really enjoying the direction that it was heading,” Anderson added. “And I didn’t have a voice in it. And so I felt like I needed to move on to something where I might have more of a voice.” Anderson has worked extensively since the series went back off the air, of course, including prominent roles in The Crown, The First Lady, and a starring role in Netflix’s Sex Education.