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Actor Gillian Anderson is performing the role of her lifetime, stepping into the legendary shoes of British Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher in season 4 of ‘The Crown’. Porter Edit enlists London-based journalist Hanna Flint for the interview.

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In fairness to Gillian Anderson, we must get straight to her activism and passions, because rather than write about her playing Margaret Thatcher, it’s more effective to drop in an excellent Netflix interview with Anderson about her role. On a personal note, Gillian Anderson tells Hanna Flint that the tumultuous past few years have made her “focus more on the things” that she’s most passionate about. This list includes charitable endeavors in South Africa, as well as campaigning for women’s equality, reproductive health and the abolishment of trafficking, among many other causes. And this year, she’s realized how much more there is to be done in terms of racial inequality:

“No matter how much work I do for charities, I don’t think I’d really ever studied or taken full account of the myriad ways that society works against people of color and minorities, how endemic it is and how structurally impossible it is for so many to get beyond a certain place.”

Crediting the Black Lives Matter movement for prompting her to unlearn false truths about society, Anderson voices sentiments that never would have been uttered by Margaret Thatcher.

“That was the beginning of an education I didn’t even know I needed,” she says, passionately. “I’m learning how brainwashed I feel I [have been] and we are as a society, and how much there is to learn about what needs to systematically change.”