What was your feeling the first time you saw yourself as David Bowie?
The weird thing was that I was wearing a flowery dress that day in the makeup trailer. The first pictures I took of myself in the mirror…the hairpiece was already on, and my response to the makeup guy was like, “Oh, my god, it’s getting close, but I still have this flowery dress on!” The juxtaposition was just a bit disturbing. (Laughs.) There was something about it that was just weird. And then I ended up having some time in my trailer while they were shooting another scene. Time was counting down, and I can’t remember if I was out of the dress yet, but as I was continuing to work, I looked up from the chair and caught myself in the mirror and I had a really strange reaction. I think it’s probably the first time in my life I’ve been dressed as a man, so to speak. It was more to do with that than seeing something that resembled another human being I was familiar with. It was more about gender. All of a sudden, I just did this photo spread — just on my phone, I haven’t sent them to anybody — but I started staring at myself in the mirror and taking pictures of the person I was seeing. It wasn’t necessarily Bowie, but it did not even feel like it was me. I was so focused on this person in the mirror who was not me. It was a very, very curious experiment. It was fascinating. (x)
Finding ways to show Media’s persona while also highlighting the person she is embodying has been a difficult challenge for the series, but Anderson’s impressive performances made it possible, according to co-showrunner Michael Green. Green said that, early on, they talked a lot about how to make her performances both an impression of the celebrity and an embodiment of Media.
“[Anderson] really hit on this idea of how to hybridize the two,” Green said. “That [Media] was using the impression only as a way to make part of her point. When she’s David Bowie, it’s done in a completely different way, and when she’s Marilyn, it’s almost mockingly. She really weaponizes her alterations and vocal quality to make herself as irresistible as possible to the person she is trying to sell. And she is always trying to sell.” (X)
“I didn’t know all that much about Marilyn as much as we all know what’s in the greater consciousness: the key pieces of her death and her struggle and her marriage and all that,” Anderson tells EW. “And actually, I was surprised at how easy I found it to immerse myself in that and how much fun it was. She was definitely the one I had the most fun doing, just because there’s an imminent joy to her. There is also with Judy [Garland], but there’s something so delightful and delicious about Marilyn that was a lot of fun to jump into. And there’s a mechanism that we used to get her floating — I was on this robotic contraption that had been built with fans in it so that my skirt was constantly moving, even though they were going to recreate and enhance some of that in CGI. So for the majority of that scene, it was me being driven around via remote control with fans blasting vertically up my dress.” Anderson laughs: “So, that was fun.”
American Gods behind the scenes photo of Gillian Anderson (Media) as Marilyn Monroe from tonight’s episode “Lemon Scented You.” Photo from Bryan Fuller’s Twitter during the live tweet.
Just Holding Hands 