Scully Worth Half? Gillian Anderson Offered Half Of Duchovny’s Pay For ‘X-Files’ Event Series

When Fox came to Gillian Anderson and asked her to reprise the X-Files role that made her famous, they only offered her half of what they promised to co-star David Duchovny. Despite fighting for equal pay throughout the original run of the cult science fiction series, Anderson discovered that in 2015, Fox execs still thought Scully was only worth half of Mulder.

Fox’s attempt to pay half price for a full Scully came to light in The Hollywood Reporter’s oral history of The X-Files . The piece, which includes interviews with stars Duchovny and Anderson, series creator Chris Carter, and a number of executives from Fox, covers much of the history of The X-Files, from inception, to cancellation, to revival, including a certain, nagging pay discrepancy.

“At first, I thought it was a joke,” Anderson told The Hollywood Reporter. “It wasn’t until we were at a small number of episodes that I could even have the conversation. Once we agreed, negotiations happened somewhere else. There’s no point in dealing with my side [first] because, as usual, they come to me with half of what they want to offer David.”

According to The Hollywood Reporter, Anderson balked at the notion that Scully was still only worth half of her partner in crime-solving. Duchovny and Anderson would ultimately receive equal pay for Fox’s newest event series, but this is a battle that Anderson has been fighting for decades.

When Anderson and Duchovny first stepped into the roles of Scully and Mulder, they weren’t exactly on the same footing. Anderson was just 25, with few acting credits to her name. Duchovny was not yet a household name, but he was known for hosting Showtime’s Red Shoe Diaries, and immediately won over the producers of The X-Files, according to The Daily Beast.

“We cast David first,” Fox’s former director of drama development, Danielle Gelber, told The Hollywood Reporter. “He was known for hosting Red Shoe Diaries on Showtime, of all things. But he was so intelligent and wry.”

Scully was pegged as a side-kick from the start, and despite equal screen time and dialogue, Anderson found herself fighting for equal treatment and pay throughout the run of the original series.

Anderson has discussed the issue of being paid half of Duchovny’s salary before. In a 2009 interview with The Telegraph, she recalls rationalizing the pay discrepancy, thinking that her Scully was only worth half of her co-star’s salary because “he had been cast first and had a body of work already whereas I was plucked from obscurity.”

That changed three years into the series, when Anderson decided that Scully was worth just as much as Mulder, and executives at Fox agreed.

“So I felt very lucky, then after three years I was like, ‘Know what? This isn’t working for me anymore.’ I made a stand and the gap in our pay closed. Was it sexism? Maybe.”

In the same interview, Anderson revealed that pay wasn’t the only discrepancy between the way executives at Fox saw Scully and Mulder. Although Anderson and Duchovny were co-stars, Scully was seen as a sidekick, and she was even instructed to never walk in front of, or even alongside, Mulder.

“It’s like the way we were directed by the studios, I was to walk behind him, never side by side. I mean, that is f—ing priceless when I think about it now. When we would get out the car and walk towards the house I would have to be behind him, even though I had equal dialogue.”

Much of that changed, along with the pay discrepancy, as the long-running series played out. So when Fox came to her again, in 2015, with an offer that valued Scully at half-price, Anderson was incredulous.

“It was shocking to me, given all the work that I had done in the past to get us to be paid fairly,” Anderson told The Daily Beast. “I worked really hard toward that and finally got somewhere with it.”

Do you think Scully is only worth half, or should Fox have offered Anderson and Duchovny equal pay from the start?