In a television landscape teeming with male-dominated Westerns, Netflix’s The Abandons is a standout for its female-helmed take with two iconic stars leading the charge.
Gillian Anderson (The X-Files) and Lena Headey (Game of Thrones) are phenomenal in their roles as two warring mothers who will do anything to protect their families in this gritty tale of the haves versus the have-nots.
Creator and executive producer Kurt Sutter’s frontier story charges in like a gunshot, staking its claim with fierce women, brutal stakes, and absolutely zero interest in playing nice, fair, or safe.
The story is centered around the widowed matriarchs of two very different families in Washington Territory in 1854, in a place known as Jasper Hollow. Anderson’s Constance Van Ness is the matriarch of a wealthy dynasty. This mother of three inherited her husband’s mining empire and doubled his fortune.
Constance wants to take over the frontier, but she’s up against Headey’s equally fierce Fiona Nolan, the head of a found family of orphans and outcasts known as the Abandons. This faith-driven mother of four refuses to let the powerful Van Ness family drive her and her children from the cattle ranch and home they built.
Neither plays by the rules nor the law, especially when their fates become linked by murder, secrets, and a bid for a piece of land with silver underneath. Anderson and Headey described how unique these roles were in a sit-down interview just before the seven-episode series premiered on December 4.
For Anderson, who portrays evil with delicious menace, this was a career first. “Well, I haven’t really played a baddie before, and I was interested in exploring that,” she explained, adding, “I was also interested in this time period, which I’d never really studied before, or necessarily even paid that much attention to, even when I was in school.”
Anderson also expressed an appreciation for being out in nature while filming. “There was the chance to go out and be in the sun, in the dust, with the horses, and the fabulous costumes in the middle of the mountains, and dive into a story that was about survival…day-to-day survival…and I feel like I haven’t necessarily had that as a through line in any of the stuff I’ve done before.”
TV lovers have adored Anderson for her role as Dana Scully in one of the longest-running science fiction series in network TV history, The X-Files. The Fox series ran for a total of 11 seasons from 1993 to 2018 (the original episodes ran for nine seasons from 1993 to 2002 with a two-season revival from 2016 to 2018).
We’ve seen Anderson play it tough before as Scully, a medical doctor-turned-FBI-agent who worked alongside David Duchovny’s Fox Mulder to investigate unsolved cases involving paranormal phenomena. Though a strong woman like Constance, Scully was not cruel.
And then fans grew to love an entirely new side of Anderson as Jean Milburn in Netflix’s hilarious and touching Sex Education. In this role, she portrayed an unconventional and oftentimes overly involved mother and successful sex therapist who becomes deeply entangled in her son’s life and the school’s sex ed issues.
This role in The Abandons allowed Anderson to go in an entirely new direction. She said the chance to work with Headey was also a big draw. “It felt like it would be so much fun! And I liked that these are two stand-alone, fierce rivals.”
When asked how she got into the mind of a woman whom she referred to as a “baddie,” Anderson paused before answering. “How does one ever get into anything? It’s part of the work that you do to try and imagine what her life must be like. I am a mother of three, and I think that parents do unnatural things to protect their young. I also think that a lot of what she’s doing is self-serving. I think it’s just burning resentment.”
Anderson’s villainous turn elevates Netflix’s The Abandons and marks a defining new chapter in her career that fans won’t soon forget.
