Gillian Anderson’s 2008 visit to the Cannes Film Festival was not especially auspicious. The Chicago-born actress was still most closely associated with the TV series The X-Files. In fact, that year she also starred in the second film spun off from the series, The X-Files: I Want to Believe. She did make a glamorous appearance as she walked the red carpet for the 61st festival’s opening night film, Fernando Meirelles’ Blindness, in a white Alberta Ferretti gown. (Asked what makes a successful red carpet gown, she cracked, “I guess what fits. If something fits, you wear it.”)
But the film that actually brought her to the Croisette was Robert Weide’s How to Lose Friends & Alienate People, starring Simon Pegg and loosely based on British journalist Toby Young’s memoir about his disastrous stint at Vanity Fair. A special promotional screening was held to whet appetites for the film, but as Rotten Tomatoes reported, “The event turned into the type of shambles that is a feature of the book when the projectors broke down midway through the first sequence.” And when the film was released later that year — a no. 1 opening in the U.K., it flopped in the U.S. — THR critic Sheri Linden, mentioning “Gillian Anderson’s master manipulator publicist,” noted that the movie “collects a fine group of actors but gives them little to do beyond striking one-note poses.”
Since then, of course, Anderson has become a queen of both prestige TV (winning an Emmy for The Crown) and British theater (where she’s to star in a revival of Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf? this fall) as well as a L’Oréal global ambassador. During a swing through Cannes last year, she told The Standard, “I’ve just come in from Vancouver, where I’ve been shooting a Jane Schoenbrun film with Hannah Einbinder. A little indie horror.” And now that film, Teenage Sex and Death at Camp Miasma, has had its world premiere in this year’s Un Certain Regard sidebar.
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