Gillian Anderson Boards Kurt Sutter’s Netflix Drama ‘The Abandons’

Rosy Cordero

28 June 2023 at 1:16 pm·2-min read

Gillian Anderson (The Crown, Sex Education) will star in Netflix’s The Abandons, the action drama series set in the West from Kurt Sutter (Mayans M.C., Sons of Anarchy) via his SutterInk banner. The X-Files alum was cast in the role prior to the start of the writers strike.

Anderson will play Constance, the matriarch of the wealthy Van Ness family who inherited her husband’s mining fortune, then doubled it. Despite the town’s inherent bias against women, her money, charm and ruthlessness created a network of political allies. For her, power, wealth and lineage trump all.

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Game of Thrones alumna Lena Headey also stars in The Abandons, which follows a group of diverse outlier families as they pursue their Manifest Destiny in 1850s Oregon while a corrupt force of wealth and power, coveting their land, tries to force them out. These abandoned souls, the kind of lost souls living on the fringe of society, unite their tribes to form a family and fight back. In this bloody process, “justice” is stretched beyond the boundaries of the law. The Abandons will explore that fine line between survival and law, the consequences of violence and the corrosive power of secrets as this family fights to keep their land.

Sutter created the series and serves as showrunner and executive producer. Emmy Grinwis also EPs alongside directors Stephen Surjik and Otto Bathurst.

Anderson most recently portrayed Eleanor Roosevelt in Showtime’s The First Lady and Vivienne Beaumier in the feature White Bird. Additionally, she earned multiple accolades for bringing to life Margaret Thatcher in Netflix’s The Crown. She is perhaps best known for her Emmy-, Golden Globe- and SAG Award-winning performance as Dana Scully on The X-Files.

Up next, she will portray Emily Maitlis opposite Rufus Sewell in Netflix’s Scoop, a dramatic retelling of the 2019 BBC television interview of Prince Andrew by presenter and journalist Emily Maitlis.

Variety was first to report Anderson’s casting.

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