“Have you turned me on?” Gillian Anderson asked, as she walked swiftly from her trailer on the back lot of a studio in Calgary, swishing up the hem of the long woollen skirt she was wearing to check whether a microphone transmitter affixed to a leather boot was functioning. It was mid-June, and Anderson had been based in Alberta since May, filming “The Abandons,” a lavish new Netflix drama set in Oregon in the mid-eighteen-hundreds. Her boots were scuffed and grimy; the previous day, she’d been shooting scenes on horseback, on location in the foothills of the Canadian Rockies, in her role as Constance Van Ness, a flinty matriarch who has inherited, and substantially increased, the mining fortune made by her late husband. “It’s dust, dust, dust for days, and then mud, mud, mud for days,” she told me, with relish.
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