Gillian Anderson Finds Strength When She Loses Everything in Toronto Drama ’The Salt Path’

In recent years, Gillian Anderson has taken on a number of roles portraying real-life high-profile women: first lady Eleanor Roosevelt, former British prime minister Margaret Thatcher, German princess consort Johanna Elisabeth and BBC journalist Emily Maitlis, to name a few. Her latest project, “The Salt Path,” based on Raynor Winn’s autobiographical book of the same name, is another true story about a strong, resilient woman facing a life-altering challenge. But in this film, Anderson turns in her period costumes for a pair of hiking boots.

“The Salt Path,” which screens at the Toronto International Film Festival, is the profound story of husband and wife Ray (Anderson) and Moth Winn’s (Jason Isaacs) 630-mile walk along a beautiful but rugged coastline in southwest England after they are forced out of their family farm. To makes matters worse, earlier the same week, Moth was diagnosed with a degenerative condition that would lead to difficulty walking and balancing, dementia, inability to swallow and, eventually, death. With all the essentials needed for survival on their backs, they begin their trek, their bond strengthening along the way; a true story of “it’s the journey, not the destination.”

“When I read the book, I could not get it out of my system for weeks,” Anderson tells Variety. “It changed my perspective on homeless individuals, on people living rough, on the fact that any one of us at any time can become homeless and destitute, and [I] truly embraced the depths of my own compassion because it feels like a universal problem that needs to be solved in terms of what happens to individuals who are going through that.”

During filming, Anderson became more and more conscious of how deeply Ray’s words and her journey with Winn were touching her. “I was acutely aware of that shifting understanding that was happening for me in the process of filming it,” she says. “Being out in nature to that degree in all versions of itself, immersing in the thought process of someone who has experienced that level of trauma, trying to reckon with it.”

There was also a big lesson that the character learned. “Societally, we believe that the more money you have, the more freedom you have, and part of what they came to understand was that the biggest freedom was actually experienced in not having anything, not having a plan, not having a root,” Anderson adds. “For so many of us — me included — the thought of losing all of those props, letting go into what would feel initially like the abyss feels like such a scary and profound experience. What they show … is that it is survivable, it is possible to come out the other side and have gained rather than lost in that journey.”

Some of the most powerful moments in the film are without dialogue, when Anderson’s Ray is silent. She has the gift of speaking without saying a word. In those moments, we are in her head, feeling the character’s trauma, her fears and her attempt to be hopeful. “I’m glad you picked up on that,” she says. “I feel like her journey was around anger, resentment, in comprehending how they could have gotten to the place that they got to and how to reconcile the truth of what was happening to them and getting to a place of acceptance with it, of not just constantly be cursing it, but embracing the reality.”

At the end of the day, Anderson hopes moviegoers who see “The Salt Path” come away with the sense that “human beings are resilient. We feel like things will literally kill us. Deaths of relatives, children, traumas, losing jobs, relationships ending. Here’s a couple who in real life literally lost everything. And one step at a time, they made it through to the other side with strength of character, a strengthened love, understanding and belief in their own resilience and ability to get through anything.”