Gillian Anderson, who reprises the role of FBI agent Dana Scully in the upcoming sequel to The X-Files film, told SCI FI Wire that it took her a while to reacquaint herself with the character she last played in 2002, when the long-running Fox TV series went off the air.

Anderson strove over the intervening years to distance herself from the character with which she had been associated for so long to the point that it took her about two days to allow Scully to re-emerge, she said.

"It's an interesting conundrum to deal with on a daily basis, and sometimes it's pleasurable, and sometimes it's just too confusing," Anderson said in an interview at WonderCon in San Francisco on Feb. 23. "And, also, doing it for a film is different from doing it for a television series. We've only done one other film, and there's a difference in lifting something to the big screen, I think, to wrap one's brain around that when one's brain is actually used to doing the TV more. It's kind of odd."

Anderson plays Scully opposite co-star David Duchovny's Fox Mulder in the upcoming second film, which is currently shooting in Vancouver, Canada, under director and series creator Chris Carter. The story picks up with the characters as if the years since the show ended had really passed.

Duchovny, similarly, said it was a challenge to bring Mulder back to life. "It's an interesting challenge as an actor to do something [like this]," he said. "It's not quite like being in a play, where you're recreating the character every night from the beginning, but it is something like that, I would imagine. It's something closer to that than making a film that's a one-off. There's a certain kind of honoring of the past work that you've done. ... You don't want to explode the character just because you don't remember, [or] because you're bored. And then you also want to honor the fact that the person has had five years of a life happening. So it's tricky. It's interesting. That makes it interesting."

The second X-Files movie, whose plot is being kept tightly under wraps, opens July 25