Gillian Anderson on Playing Miss Havisham in Great Expectations

Vulture has a great little interview with Gillian Anderson about her take on Miss Havisham in the screen adaptation of Charles Dickens' Great Expectations.

Here's a snippet...
Miss Havisham is a complicated woman. The way you play her, with that singsong voice, adds a beautiful lost-soul quality, as if she were a child who's never grown up.
That's an aspect of her. There's a certain amount of childish spitefulness, too. I didn't want her to be eaten away by resentment, because it's not clear that it's eaten her alive. There's a lot more poetry to her than that, and that's what I found in her voice after the first few readings. I thought of her like an addict. She was living vicariously through Estella. She fed on the information Estella would give her, jonesing for that fix, like it was a dose of heroin. And there was something about that state of craving, obsessing, jonesing, that makes her interesting.

Do you think she was playing a Victorian version of The Game? The way she teaches Estella to be a pickup artist of sorts, to always have the upper hand?
[Laughs.] That's absolutely it! I think it's all about how to break a man's heart — to be alluring and seductive and then completely frigid and insulting. I absolutely imagined all of those things — and simpler lessons that were more about not giving, not being generous, not being kind, making fun of people. I would imagine how she would teach Estella to master that kind of control over somebody, how to walk in a room and draw them in, make them fall in love, and then treat them like shit. And she taught her that love was death.

Read the rest here   Do you think Gillian (Agent Scully in XFiles) Anderson will make a good Miss Havisham?

Updated: 1/16/2018