Gillian Anderson is best known for The X-Files, but she’s confessing that there was a time when she didn’t truly appreciate the sci-fi phenomenon.

“Because when you’re doing something like that, all anybody says is, ‘Oh my god. The show. Oh my god. It’s the most amazing [thing]!’ And you don’t wanna hear that anymore. You don’t,” she said on a recent episode of the Smartless podcast, which is hosted by fellow actors Will Arnett, Jason Bateman, and Sean Hayes.

And then, it hit her.

“I suddenly got what they were talking about, like, five years after the show ended,” Anderson said. “I was kinda like, ‘Yeah. That was kinda cool. I was on this really cool show.'”

The X-Files originally aired from 1993 to 2002, before being revived in 2016, when it ran for two more seasons. For most of it, she played Dana Scully, an FBI agent partnered with David Duchovny‘s Fox Mulder, to investigate unexplained cases, on 15-time Emmy-winning series.

Anderson said she had just needed some space after so long in the role.

“You know what happens when you, you’re on a long running show is everything becomes so enmeshed and and not incestuous, but you literally feel like you’re, you’re living and breathing this, you know, the entire crew, the entire experience,” she said. “And so I think by the time we were done after — you know, we did nine years — and I think I was well ready for it to be over.”

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Anderson said that, for a while, she had “compartmentalized” the series.

“I so wanted to get off it and start doing the things that I thought my career was going to be before I said yes to that job,” she said. “You know, I’d imagined I’d be doing Merchant Ivory films, and I imagined I’d be doing all this. You know? And so I really wanted to, on the one hand, forget that that happened and and bounce off it to the stuff that I really wanted to do.”

Anderson previously said that she appreciates what the show did for her career, even if it was unexpected.

“I was so green at the beginning, and so young, and I was just exploring,” she told Variety in January 2018. “I showed up and hit my mark and learned my lines and was pulled into this vortex of this hit show. It was my first professional, proper gig, and it was a cannon of sorts.”

Outside of playing Scully, Anderson has appeared in roles such as former British Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher on The Crown in 2020, former first lady Eleanor Roosevelt in the 2022 Showtime series The First Lady, and as sex therapist Jean Milburn on Netflix’s Sex Education (2019-2023) series.