Gillian Anderson Shares When She Feels Most Beautiful (Exclusive)

Gillian Anderson is walking the walk.

The actress and mother of three joined the L’Oréal Paris family as a global spokeswoman in February 2025 at 56, first appearing in an Age Perfect campaign created to empower women over 50 to “chase their goals.” She leads by example.

With more than 70 acting credits under her belt, she’s stepping behind the camera to co-produce the TV adaptation of novel The Coast Road. She’s also stepping on the runway with L’Oréal Paris for the brand’s 8th annual Le Défilé fashion show as an official partner of Paris Fashion Week.

“It’s pretty incredible,” Anderson tells PEOPLE of participating in the event one day before it was set to take place.

“I’ve been slightly not wanting to think about it because obviously it’s a big deal [and] I’ve never walked a catwalk before. [But] it’s an honor to be asked, and it’s really important what it stands for and the fact that L’Oréal is an inclusive brand that really embraces such a diverse community.”

It’s a community Anderson, who only recently began taking an interest in skin care, feels right at home with.

“I spent most of my life not really paying that much attention to any kind of a routine,”
she admits. “I would be very lazy and wear the same makeup for a few days — not washing it off and adding to the layers of the mascara. Since becoming an ambassador and really talking about routine, I have [created one].”

Anderson adds that “changes” to her face and body inspired her to take seeking out effective products “seriously.” Now she’s got a power duo on her vanity: the “silky”-feeling Age Perfect Serum Le Duo for the daytime and the “rich”-feeling Age Perfect Collagen Night Moisturizer in the evening.

“What’s great about the brand is that they’re not asking me to pretend,” she explains. “It’s perfectly fine to be able to say, ‘You know what? I’ve been doing this for a year, and that’s it.’”

Even though Anderson feels inspired to share her truth, she admits this journey has, at moments, felt unreal.

“[The partnership] was a conversation that was happening over a long period of time, and I found myself almost ignoring it just in case it didn’t happen. And when it did, and I was at my first photo shoot, I think I was slightly stunned because it just felt so surreal,” she shared.

“I mean, my first many years were in London, and then we moved to Grand Rapids, Mich., and so felt like a small-town girl in the Midwest in a way. And I think as [the partnership] has gone on and I’ve been having more conversations as an ambassador and embracing and taking ownership of the role, it’s the same as what I think potentially happens when you start to take ownership of the slogan [‘Worth It’], you start to believe it a little bit more.”

“When I was first formally asked, I was worried about feeling that it would feel cheesy or I would be putting something on. And then I saw the Ilon Specht documentary,” Anderson continues, referencing the 17-minute film, The Final Copy of Ilon Specht, about the woman who coined the now-famous slogan “Because I’m Worth It” in 1971.

“She is such a firecracker,” Anderson says. “The way that she talks about why she came up with that slogan oh so many years ago, she’s literally lying on the bed with her 80-something beautiful wrinkled face, basically saying f— you to all the men who doubted her. And I thought, ‘You know what? I get it now. I get what it means. I get the importance of it. I get the history of it.’ I see it as a courageous, bold, feminist statement because it’s about self-value.”

Anderson says when it comes to believing in yourself, “sometimes it does mean saying it when we don’t believe it yet, and acting as if we are the person who believes it, until we become the person who believes it.”

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At the runway show at the iconic Hôtel de Ville, which “reimagined the iconic French motto—Liberté. Egalité. Sororité—through a new lens, as a powerful celebration of sisterhood, feminism, equality and solidarity,” according to a release, Anderson walked with fellow spokeswomen Kendall Jenner, Cara Delevingne, Ariana Greenblatt, Aja Naomi King, Viola Davis, Eva Longoria, Andie MacDowell and more. 

While she looked every bit a classic beauty in a silver dress and sandals, Anderson says feeling beautiful radiates from the inside out.

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“It doesn’t really have anything to do with a beauty regimen or wearing makeup or even necessarily even having my hair done,” she says of her experience. 

“There are some days where you just feel confident or feel more like yourself, more in your body. And I think that it’s got not much to do with the outside. It’s got quite a lot to do with the inside.”