Before becoming Dana Scully and spending years investigating unexplained phenomena on The X-Files, Gillian Anderson found herself in a teenage episode that could easily have ended up in one of those files.
The actress recounted that, as a teenager, she was arrested after breaking into her school in Grand Rapids, Michigan, at night. As she recently revealed, she was under the influence of crystal meth. The story appeared in episode 412 of Conan O’Brien Needs a Friend, which aired on August 17, 2026. In the episode, Anderson reflected on a period of her teenage years she had previously described as quite chaotic. The arrest wasn’t entirely unknown to the public; what she did add this time was the detail of what she had taken.
And no, that isn’t the only drug experience from those years Anderson has recently talked about: while promoting her new movie, the actress recalled a terrible experience with marijuana and The Texas Chain Saw Massacre that, she says, virtually kept her away from horror movies for decades.
Methamphetamine, High School, and a Failed Escape Attempt
The conversation with Conan O’Brien began with a rather prophetic detail: in high school, Anderson’s classmates had voted her “most likely to be arrested.” “And then you made good on that,” O’Brien remarked. Anderson confirmed it.
She said she and some others went to the school in the early hours of the morning with a peculiar plan: to glue the locks shut so the building couldn’t be opened the next day. O’Brien called the prank “aggressive.” Anderson replied that… yes. Basically, “that was kind of me at that time.”
It was her punk phase. Anderson wore pointed boots with buckles and a particularly thin sole, which had some decidedly unglamorous consequences when a guard began chasing her through downtown Grand Rapids and she stepped on a nail. Anderson said that was what stopped her and added that, had that not happened, she probably would have managed to escape.
Then came the revelation. “Let’s just say I was doing a little crystal meth at the time…” Anderson said on the podcast. She added that she was in a great mood and managed to get the charge reduced from breaking and entering to trespassing—from a charge related to forcibly entering a property without authorization to a lesser charge of unauthorized entry.
The night just kept getting worse… Anderson said that her boyfriend at the time—whom she described as “considerably older”—went back to his apartment and continued smoking and drinking while she was in custody.
O’Brien summed up the situation: in jail, with a nail in her foot, and high on meth. “Yes,” was all Anderson could say. “Iconic,” hundreds of Instagram commenters wrote.
Weed, The Texas Chain Saw Massacre, and a Bad Trip That Lasted for Years
Meth isn’t the only substance that came up in the stories Anderson recently shared as she reminisced about her teenage years.
During an interview with Extra alongside Hannah Einbinder to promote their new movie Teenage Sex and Death at Camp Miasma, Anderson said that one of her earliest experiences with horror movies happened after she had smoked some particularly potent weed. The movie was The Texas Chain Saw Massacre.
“I saw it… after some very strong pot and it was not a fun experience,” she recalled. According to Anderson, she has hardly watched any horror movies since then.
In a separate interview with The Wall Street Journal, she offered more context. She said that, as a teenager, she had a really bad trip smoking weed at someone else’s house while they were watching The Texas Chain Saw Massacre; she felt as though she were trapped in a place she couldn’t leave, and that the experience ended up shaping her relationship with the genre for much of her life.
This period of her life isn’t entirely new to the public either. In a profile published by The New Yorker in 2024, the actress spoke of her teenage years as a period of rebellion and attention-seeking. She recalled that there was “a lot of alcohol” and “a lot of drugs” in her life back then and said she wasn’t proud of some of her destructive behaviors.
At age 21, as she recounted in that same interview, she stopped drinking and drastically changed her lifestyle.
From ‘Most Likely to Be Arrested’ to Playing an FBI Agent
Anderson’s teenage arrest had already been reported before her conversation with Conan. Complex, citing a 1997 interview later unearthed by The Telegraph, notes that Anderson had said she didn’t receive a fine but did have to perform community service after the incident. The new detail revealed in 2026 is, therefore, much more specific: Anderson now says she used methamphetamine that night.
The contrast with what came next is quite striking. Anderson studied acting at DePaul University’s Theatre School, and a few years after her punk-rock teenage years, she landed the role that would change her career. In 1993, she made her debut as Dana Scully, the ultra-rational doctor and FBI agent on The X-Files, a role that made her an international star.
Today, with the benefit of hindsight, Gillian Anderson recounts those stories about drugs and rebellion more as portraits of an earlier version of herself than as exploits to be celebrated. In fact, she had already acknowledged that some of that teenage behavior was destructive and that she wasn’t proud of it.
But there’s a biographical irony that’s hard to beat: the punk teenager voted “most likely to be arrested”—who ended up in custody after a chase, a nail, and hard drugs—went on to play, just a few years later, one of television’s most famous federal agents. Ironic, isn’t it? Or rather: iconic.
Cover photo: Alex Archambault, CC BY 2.0, via Wikimedia Commons // Radspunk, CC BY-SA 4.0, via Wikimedia Commons
