With a new book about fantasies, the “Sex Education” star Gillian Anderson is hoping to help women tap into their most intimate desires — in and out of the bedroom.

With a new book about fantasies, the “Sex Education” star Gillian Anderson is hoping to help women tap into their most intimate desires — in and out of the bedroom.

Because even if you’re the actual sexiest person in the world, you can feel entirely unsexy if you’re self-conscious or full of shame, she said. Beyond that, she has come to believe that the discomfort many women have with their bodies and desires is holding them back — in the bedroom and in life.

Over the past few years, Ms. Anderson has taken on a handful of side projects focused on women’s pleasure, including publishing a new book, “Want: Sexual Fantasies by Anonymous,” on Sept. 17. The book is meant to help women feel more comfortable expressing their most intimate desires and embracing what feels good.

“We think of pleasure as being frivolous,” she said, sitting cross-legged on a cream-colored couch, wearing a black sundress and no makeup or shoes. But “what is the point of this complex, torturous existence that we find ourselves in as human beings if there can’t be an element of joy and pleasure?”

ImageA portrait of Gillian Anderson standing in a green dress with her hands in her pockets. She stands in front of a gray backdrop.
Ms. Anderson said she constantly worried she would be fired from “The X-Files,” and suffered from panic attacks. “Yes, I had chutzpah at that stage in my life,” she said, but a lot of it was just acting brave to conceal her insecurities.Credit…Olivia Lifungula for The New York Times
For fans of the widely praised Netflix dramedy series “Sex Education,” which ended last fall, Ms. Anderson’s sex-first approach to well-being will most likely feel familiar.

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On the award-winning series, Ms. Anderson plays Dr. Jean Milburn, a sex therapist and mother to a teenage son in the Welsh countryside. Her character, whose home is filled with Georgia O’Keeffe-esque art and wooden phalluses, begins the series as something of a caricature. But by the end, she proves to be a relatable, perimenopausal single mother to a new infant, struggling to connect with her own sexuality and desires in the haze of postpartum depression.

“The whole ethos behind Jean as a character is that there are no questions too strange or no fantasies too odd,” said Ben Taylor, who directed much of the first two seasons.

Since “Sex Education,” Ms. Anderson has played a somewhat crude version of Jean in real life, too. Earlier this year, she wore a Gabriela Hearst gown embroidered with vulvas to the Golden Globe Awards. (In one video of herself in the dress, she is pretending to eat a sausage.) Last year, she launched a line of sodas called G Spot. On Instagram, she regularly shares, with a literal wink and a smirk, images of objects that resemble vulvas and penises — a rocky crevice here, an erect glacier there — in an effort, she says, to normalize the conversation around private parts.

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When it came time to gather women’s anonymous fantasies for the book, Ms. Anderson’s relationship with her 3.3 million followers — cultivated through years of intimate straight-to-camera videos and, of course, all that suggestive imagery — was crucial. The project was initially named “Dear Gillian,” and her calls for submissions felt personal.

“I’m curating a book of your anonymous letters to me,” she said in one appeal on Instagram. “Wherever you come from, whether you’re 18 or 80, you sleep with men or women or nonbinary individuals or all or no one at all, I want to know your most personal desires. Let’s open up this conversation together, and create something revelatory.”

The book was conceived a few seasons into “Sex Education,” after publishers had been clamoring for her to write about sex. She didn’t feel equipped to write a how-to guide, or a book-length exploration of the vulva, as one publisher suggested. But when her literary agent, Claire Conrad, suggested curating a collection of anonymous sexual fantasies, she became intrigued.

To prepare for her role as Dr. Milburn, Ms. Anderson had skimmed the 1973 best seller “My Secret Garden,” in which Nancy Friday, a journalist, gathered women’s anonymous sexual fantasies at a time when it was taboo to acknowledge that women fantasized about anyone other than their husbands. Ms. Anderson read it mostly to “get my brain into the minds of women other than myself,” she said, which she hoped would serve her in treating her fictional patients.

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In 2022, Ms. Conrad proposed compiling a contemporary version of the book, and Ms. Anderson was sold — it was a book she herself felt excited to read. “Somehow we sort of, together, cracked up this idea of what happens if you just did that again — how would things have changed?” Ms. Conrad said.

Ms. Anderson’s publisher set up an encrypted portal for women to submit their fantasies. They received 1,118 letters, Ms. Conrad said, and used 174 in the book — including a fantasy written by Ms. Anderson. (She won’t reveal which one.)

In a departure from “My Secret Garden,” most of the fantasies in “Want” are from women who identify as bisexual or pansexual (Ms. Anderson herself has dated both women and men). They represent a range of life circumstances, religions and income levels. Fantasies are grouped by theme in chapters with titles such as “Off Limits,” “Rough and Ready,” “Strangers” and “Kink.”

Contributors fantasized about having sex in a church (“In the pews, under the stained-glass windows, staring at Jesus on the cross”); sex with sibling heirs to an art fortune; sex with Harry Styles. They wrote of their desires to have sex with a female therapist and with a best friend. Several women dreamed about having sex with robots attuned to their every desire.

And yet, Ms. Anderson told me, “I was taken by the amount of shame today.”

Many of the submissions expressed the same feelings of ambivalence women had conveyed to Ms. Friday half a century earlier. Then and now, women wrote of feeling embarrassed by their perceived physical imperfections, or feeling guilty about their sexual appetite or desires, particularly when they involved anything beyond heterosexual sex within marriage. They wrote of “their fear or reluctance to talk to a partner about what they truly think about when they are having sex with them or, often, when masturbating alone,” Ms. Anderson writes.

“I do wonder whether there’s a correlation between being afraid to ask for what we want from our most intimate relationships and asking for what we want in other areas of our lives,” she told me during our interview.

In the book, Ms. Anderson suggests that she is figuring out what she wants alongside the reader. “If I’m honest, I think there are two sides to me, as perhaps there are to many women: the side that is good at asking for what I want and the side that will concede to my partner’s desires, that is happy to share my innermost urges but only if my partner starts the conversation (and then not all of them),” she writes in the introduction. “Is that due to shame? Or an indication that I wouldn’t trust anyone with that level of intimacy? Or is it that I think it’s somehow better to be, in part, unknowable?”

A portrait of Gillian Anderson sitting in a green dress as her hand plays with her earring. She wears a watch and bracelets on her wrist.
In her 40s, Ms. Anderson grew weary of incessantly critiquing herself. “I was so sick and tired of so much time being spent in that kind of self-obsession and self-hate and negative thinking,” she said. Letting go was liberating.Credit…Olivia Lifungula for The New York Times

Ms. Anderson grew up in both London and Grand Rapids, Mich., and her accent fluctuates depending on whom she’s talking to. (I got the American Gillian.) She speaks deliberately, taking seconds-long pauses between words and gazing into the distance.

In high school, she joined the small but hard-core Grand Rapids punk scene, and took to wearing her hair in a mohawk. Her classmates voted her most likely to get arrested. She has had a lifelong aversion to being told what to do, but, she said, this hasn’t made her immune to the pressures of being a woman in Hollywood.

For years, fans treated her like a role model, she said, seeing her as an extension of the fearless characters she often plays. But until recently, she turned down many requests to speak as herself on social issues like equal pay or women’s rights — and struggled to see herself as an effective spokeswoman at all, she said, in part because of a lack of confidence.

In her 20s, Ms. Anderson constantly worried she would be fired from “The X-Files,” and suffered from panic attacks. Even after she’d taken home top awards for playing a character defined by self-assurance, she felt undeserving and riddled with doubt. “I could still hear my squeaky, squeaky voice in my ear,” she said, particularly when her character was asked to give orders to those played by more experienced male actors. “Yes, I had chutzpah at that stage in my life,” she said, but a lot of it was just acting brave to conceal her own insecurities.

But as she’s gotten older, the chasm between the brazen characters she portrays and her actual self has begun to narrow, she said. In her 40s, she grew weary of incessantly critiquing herself. “I was so sick and tired of so much time being spent in that kind of self-obsession and self-hate and negative thinking,” she said. Letting go was liberating.

Ms. Anderson said she became inspired to advocate sex positivity in the 2010s while playing Stella Gibson, a detective assigned to investigate a serial killer in the Netflix crime drama series “The Fall,” set in Northern Ireland. The character’s physical, intellectual and sexual confidence inspired her to revisit her own views. “Stella opened up something in me in terms of sexual confidence, and also awakening a sense of femininity and sensuality,” she said.

If Stella Gibson cracked the door to her sexuality, her character on “Sex Education” flung it wide open.

Being on that series convinced her that conversation itself can help dismantle taboos around sex, desire and “anything to do with personal pleasure,” she said.

So far, Ms. Anderson’s role as a real-life spokeswoman for sex positivity has been limited to her personal projects. Her emphasis on sex — juvenile jokes and all — is fast becoming something of a personal brand. It’s too soon to know whether this will grow into genuine advocacy, or whether it will remain nothing more than a racy marketing strategy.

And for all her frankness and enlightenment, Ms. Anderson remains mum on her own sex life. She has no plans to speak publicly about the details of her own proclivities, nor her longtime relationship with her partner, Peter Morgan, who created the television show “The Crown.”

“The choices I make in the public arena already have great impact on my very private partner and three children,” she said. “Subjecting them to any more scrutiny or tabloid headlines is unfair and unkind.”

After 30 years on the public stage, however, Ms. Anderson is skilled at revealing just enough of herself to convince fans that she understands them. That she may even be one of them. They want to believe.

Danielle Friedman is a journalist in New York and the author of “Let’s Get Physical: How Women Discovered Exercise and Reshaped the World.” More about Danielle Friedman