Gillian Anderson has said she didn’t enjoy her role in The X-Files and only stayed with the show for nine years because she had signed a contract.

She told Stella magazine recently: “I couldn’t get out of it. I didn’t have a choice. I had to sign a contract for five-and-a-half-years before I even went to my first audition - when I didn’t know if I’d got the part. Back then I was all innocent and I thought, ‘Wow that sounds wonderful.’

“But then, when I started, I realised I’d be in a Canadian wood working 16 hours a day for nine months a year. And the reason I stayed so long was because the only way I could get more money was to commit myself to doing it for another couple of years.”

She added that she found her sudden fame hard to deal with: “When I started on The X Files I had no idea what it would involve. When fans used to ask, as they always did, ‘Do you believe in aliens?’ I literally had no idea what to say. I used to go, ‘Um… could you repeat the question?’ I found the whole process incredibly traumatic.”