Sex Education may be over, but Gillian Anderson isn’t done plumbing the depths of female sexuality. The actor tapped into her inner Dr. Jean Milburn with her new book, Want (Abrams), a modern answer to Nancy Friday’s 1973 book My Secret Garden: Women’s Sexual Fantasies. After sounding a call for women and femmes from around the world—whatever their age, race, religion, sexuality, or socioeconomic background—to share their most private sexual fantasies anonymously, Anderson compiled just a fraction of the responses into an anthology grouped into chapters by theme, delving into BDSM, voyeurism, sex with strangers, and beyond.
It should come as no surprise that Anderson—a woman who arrived at the 2024 Golden Globes in a Gabriela Hearst dress covered in vulvas and long kept up a spirited presence on Instagram with her frequent #penisoftheday and #yonioftheday posts—was keen to sign onto the project. But what she couldn’t anticipate was just how challenging it would be to chronicle her own fantasies. “It was just the physical act of writing such intimate stuff—even writing down particular words,” she says. “I was so shocked by my shock.”
Below, Anderson tells Vogue about incorporating her beloved Sex Education character into the book, writing down her own innermost desires, and what she was surprised to learn about herself during the process.
Vogue: How did you conceive of the idea for Want?
Gillian Anderson: Actually, it was an idea that came from my literary agent. Apparently, she’d been getting some requests, since I did Sex Education, for me to do a book with interviews with women about their sexual fantasies. She had the idea about asking women to send in their fantasies anonymously. She was very familiar with My Secret Garden and actually still had her mother’s copy from the ’70s.
How did you narrow those submissions down?
I had a couple of editors working with me to help narrow them down, and it became clear that we probably needed to create chapter headings, just to bring clarity. Once we settled on what those headings might be, it made it easier to group the submissions. [We] wanted to make sure that the breadth of representation was vast. We could have put a lot more in, but we didn’t want it to be too thick. We wanted whoever was reading it to be able to carry it around and not feel like it was a massive tome.