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Rise to Fame
Fox wanted someone with more TV experience and greater sex appeal, but she got Dana Scully anyway. At 24, she auditioned for The X-Files and producer Chris Carter had to fight the network to get her cast. The show defined the 1990s sci-fi moment and made her an unlikely TV star. She won an Emmy and a Golden Globe for Scully, becoming one of the defining faces of prestige television before anyone used that phrase.
In the Spotlight
She's spent the years since Scully deliberately picking the opposite of Scully. As DSU Stella Gibson in The Fall, she played a detective cold enough to make viewers uncomfortable. Playing Margaret Thatcher in The Crown Season 4 earned her a second Golden Globe in 2021. Then she pivoted to playing a free-spirited sex therapist in Sex Education for four seasons on Netflix. Three wildly different characters, and not one of them the earnest scientist she started with.
Side Notes
She's bidialectal, born in Chicago and raised partly in London, and can switch between Midwestern American and proper British accents depending on which country she's in. Her high school classmates voted her 'Most Likely to be Arrested,' which wasn't entirely off: she was caught filling door locks with glue the night before graduation. A Chicago brewery named a Belgian farmhouse ale after her. She's lived in London since 2002 and doesn't seem particularly interested in changing that.