Presented for your consideration: a picture of Gillian Anderson re-enacting the movie Creature from the Black Lagoon, featured on the February 1997 cover of Rolling Stone.
Only… there may be more to this than meets the eye.
If you recall the 1974 rough draft of The Star Wars, sixteen-year-old Princess Leia Aquilae had red (well, auburn) hair:
The princess, her long auburn hair tied in braids, moves to the general and he bows before her.
GENERAL
May your studies do you honor.
Leia is somewhat embarrassed by the general’s formality and can only manage an awkward smile before returning to her parents at the speeder.
Same shade, more or less, as Gillian Anderson’s hair in the 1990s, seen above.
But that’s not all - in the 1974 draft, the character of “Han Solo” (really more of a Chewbacca sidekick figure) was "a huge, green skinned monster with no nose and large gills". This heroic alien with the familiar name was a “Ureallian”… who just happened to look like a long-lost cousin to the Creature from the Black Lagoon.
However, others of Han Solo’s species weren’t nearly as nice. Later in the script, when the heroes crash-land on the jungle world of Yavin, a band of nine Ureallian trappers capture (and by implication gang-rape) Leia:
Two of the trappers yell at one another in a friendly argument. One shirtless creature goes into a “crawler,” and the remaining eight laugh hysterically. Starkiller moves further out on the limb to get a better view. A couple of pieces of bark break loose, and float a hundred feet to the ground. The trappers fail to notice. Moments later, the shirtless trapper emerges from the crawler with Princess Leia held unconscious and half naked over his head.
So - if this photoshoot is any indication - maybe Gillian Anderson knows a lot more about Star Wars (and The Star Wars) than most people?
After all, her Tumblr account name is “Chewbacca’s Girlfriend”…
