Am I to understand that you want me to debunk the X-Files project, sir?

Agent Scully, we trust she'll make the proper scientific analysis.

How'd you come to work for the FBI?

Well, sir, I was recruited out of medical school.

My parents still think it was an act of rebellion, but I saw the FBI as a place where I could distinguish myself.

I'm Greta Johnson.

I'm Trisha Bobita.

And this is the Nerdette podcast.

This week, Jillian Anderson, best known for her role as Scully on The X-Files, stops by to talk about fish and the ocean and a few other nerdy things.

And we'll hear from Megan Murphy Gill. She made us a nerdette soda. So we both had pretty exciting weekends.

Yes, I actually stayed up past 8 o'clock both on Friday and on Saturday. It was wild.

On Friday night, I went to see trombone Shorty, who is a really wonderful funk musician. He makes the trombone look super cool. And then I went home and watched Tramé. It was really lovely. I highly recommend Tramay if anybody hasn't seen it. I had been kind of saving it, I guess, for a while, but I'm really glad I started watching it because it's delightful. Delightful, really? I mean, it's delightfully done storytelling. I'm sorry, I guess delightful isn't quite the right word. Tell us about your weekend, Tricia. It sounds especially nerdy. We got to know a while back from the producers of a show here in Chicago called

Mick Siff. And they said, hey, we've taken Macbeth, the original Shakespearean text,

slimmed it down to a nice 70 minutes, and added lightsabers, would you like to come watch it?

And there's really only one possible response to that. Absolutely. And I have to say,

it was a blast. It's kind of my favorite

way to see theater is in these small little black boxes with just all the heart and none of the

budget. We're talking Macbeth. So like what, ghosts, caldrons, witches, were all of those still in play?

Oh yes. But with lightsabers. I can't stress this enough. Oh, man, that sounds really good. My name's Orion Cooling. I was on stage with a whole bunch of really talented actors doing Shakespearean text in the Star Wars universe. You're not going to see Op.1 Kenobi on stage. You're going to see Banquo. And there might be archetypes that are similar to the Star Wars archetypes, But those are true for no matter what show you watch. I mean, Star Wars is built upon archetypes. For example, I have my friend Michaela Cruz. He's here with us right now as well. She's one of the witches in the show. And we have a lot of fun with the witches. They play a far bigger part in our production than they do in most traditional Scottish plays, as it were. The evil does. The evil's consistently in like every scene. It's there. It never leaves. The dark side is always going to be a part of that show. And I think we just kind of amped it up as we have amped up everything in the show. It's so much fun. And you kept the text there, but I did hear a couple of references to a wamp rat, this or that, things that are sort of winks and nods to fans of the Star Wars universe.

Yeah, the goal was just to touch it, just to touch it, not to lean on it. It should not be a crutch. It should just be fun when you hear it, like, ah. There's a few moments that were like, We are way in depth into that geek mode.

The witches that Michaela and her team play are definitely based on death mirror.

They're based upon these rancor riding witches. And that's what their makeup is slightly based on. We also changed a lot of the female and turp for the show. Lady Monduff, Macduff, for those of you who didn't see our show, we made her a very strong warrior. And that was something very fun to play with. It's so much fun. This is a Venn diagram overlap of, like, two of the things I nerd out about most. So I come from working in the theater, and then I'm also a huge geek for Star Wars. Do you find that your audiences are sort of one or the other, and so they're picking up on maybe half of the story, or are there more Star Wars Shakespeare nerds in Chicago that I knew about?

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