Dana Scully spent nine seasons refusing to believe anything without evidence. Gillian Anderson, it turns out, has seen the evidence, and she is convinced.
The actor who defined skepticism for a generation of television viewers has read the pilot script Ryan Coogler wrote for Hulu’s revival of The X-Files, and she came away from it sounding like the least skeptical person in the room. Speaking to Entertainment Tonight this week alongside her Teenage Sex and Death at Camp Miasma costar Hannah Einbinder, Anderson delivered what amounts to a full endorsement of the project and the filmmaker steering it. “I cannot think of a better person to take the helm,” she said, adding that she cannot wait to see the finished product because she considers Coogler extraordinary. The script itself she called brilliant, and the specific compliment she paid it is the one longtime fans will care about most: she was struck by how different and yet how quintessentially like an X-File it was.
That is a delicate needle to thread, and Anderson knows better than almost anyone how easily it gets missed. The X-Files is not a franchise that has been left alone. It premiered on Fox in 1993, ran nine seasons through 2002, spun off two theatrical features in 1998 and 2008, and then came back for two more limited seasons in 2016 and 2018 with Anderson and David Duchovny both returning. Some of that later material landed. Some of it did not. The fan base that emerged from all of it is protective in a way that borders on territorial, and any new version arrives carrying the weight of every previous attempt to recapture what worked the first time.
Coogler has been circling this one for a while. Reports of his involvement with a new X-Files first surfaced in 2023, when he and original series creator Chris Carter were described as working together on a modern remounting, a word vague enough to mean almost anything. The project sat in development while Coogler finished Black Panther: Wakanda Forever and then made Sinners, the 1930s vampire film that turned into both a commercial hit and an awards magnet, winning Academy Awards for Best Original Screenplay and Best Cinematography. Coming off that, he had the leverage to pick whatever he wanted next, and he picked this.
Hulu ordered the pilot in February, with Coogler writing, directing, and executive producing, and Jennifer Yale of Your Friends & Neighbors attached as showrunner and executive producer. Carter is aboard as a non-writing executive producer, alongside Sev Ohanian and Zinzi Coogler through Proximity Media. Danielle Deadwyler, whose credits include Till, The Piano Lesson, and Station Eleven, was announced in the first lead role, with Himesh Patel of Yesterday and Station Eleven joining shortly after. The official logline describes two highly decorated but very different FBI agents who form an unlikely bond after being assigned to a long-shuttered division devoted to cases involving unexplained phenomena.
If that sounds familiar, it is supposed to. The original pairing of Scully and Mulder worked because the two agents represented incompatible ways of processing the same impossible evidence, and the show never fully resolved the argument between them. A new pair of agents inheriting a division that was closed down and left to gather dust is a structure that acknowledges the history rather than pretending it never happened, which suggests this is less a hard reset than a continuation set some distance down the road. That reading leaves the door open for the original cast to turn up, and it is exactly the door Anderson declined to walk through when Einbinder asked her directly whether she might appear.
Anderson first played dumb, feigning surprise that a revival existed at all, then told Einbinder she could not answer the question about her own involvement while happily answering the one about Coogler. It is the same posture she has held for more than a year. Back in May 2025, on ITV’s This Morning, she said she had spoken to Coogler and told him that if anyone were going to do it, he was the perfect person, then joked that he should call her and allowed that if the phone rang at the right moment with the right idea, perhaps. She was more emphatic in March of this year at Awesome Con in Washington, where she told an audience the pilot script was genuinely good and urged skeptical fans to keep an open mind, describing the material as different and special.
Duchovny has been quieter. He told The Hollywood Reporter in April that he had not read the pilot script, though he acknowledged there had been talks about a possible cameo.
The pilot has already shot, wrapping production at the start of July, and it filmed in Vancouver, the same city where the original series shot its first five seasons and where the perpetual overcast gave the show its particular damp, unlit atmosphere. Whether Hulu converts the pilot into a full series order is the outstanding question, and the timing matters, because Coogler is expected to move on to Black Panther 3 and is unlikely to direct much beyond this first episode himself.
For now, the most useful signal available comes from the person with the least reason to be generous about it. Anderson gave eleven seasons to this material and owes nobody a kind word about somebody else’s version of it. She read the script anyway, and she came out believing.
The X-Files streams on Hulu and Disney+.
