Gillian Anderson says playing Margaret Thatcher in ‘The Crown’ was the most technically difficult role of her career.
Gillian Anderson
The 52-year-old actress played the British prime minister in season four of the Netflix hit, and has said she knew she was taking “risks” when she took on the demanding role, and was prepared for people to think it was “a car crash”.
She told Vanity Fair: “When you take risks, there is a possibility that you will humiliate yourself and fall flat on your face.
“I knew I was going to throw everything at it, and if people reacted by saying what a car crash it is, I would just have to deal with that and maybe go to bed for a month.”
Gillian’s dedication to the character paid off though, and the actress bagged both a Golden Globe and a Screen Actors Guild Award for the role.
And earlier this year, the actress said she was “really f****** nervous” about coming on board the mammoth project.
She explained: “I was really f****** nervous. At the same time, it’s a wonderful production run by adults who have done it before. They shoot the first two weeks of stuff for any big new character on the soundstages. It was comforting to know that if I sucked, it would be easy to reshoot as opposed to renting a countryside mansion for another day because I was bad.
“I had an intense scene on my first day of work, and I knew that even if I did my absolute best, I’d probably be a bit more in her shoes, her voice, her everything, a few weeks down the road. It made it easier to have that safety net in case I wasn’t quite there at the beginning.”
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