Relations used to be cold, but the actor says he now has fun with his co-star Gillian Anderson. Though he has to admit he forgot about their baby
THERE are only two reasons to go to Hollywood Boulevard: to see the stars or to buy drugs. David Duchovny fans can now do both at once. His star on the Walk of Fame (the 2,572nd), which I watched being unveiled two weeks ago, sits in the midst of the dope dealers and a few feet from the Smoke House, a shop specialising in hookah pipes, vaping kit and anything you might need to satiate the munchies.
I realise how fitting this is when I meet Duchovny in a Los Angeles hotel a little later on. I find a man so monosyllabic and monotone that he appears either to have been smoking heavily or to be on the brink of falling asleep. In fact he is just tired.
We are here because of The X-Files — the paranormal show that drew American audiences of more than 25m in its heyday and became a global hit for much of the 1990s. The show ended in 2002, but now Mulder and Scully, the two FBI agents at its heart, played by Duchovny and Gillian Anderson, are back for a six-part series.
Since its launch in 1993, there have been more than 200 episodes, two feature films, countless blood-sucking mutants and so many convoluted plot twists that even its stars can’t really keep up.
I’d forgotten Mulder and Scully were supposed to have had a child, I say when he draws up a stool. “Me too,” he drawls. “I forgot the baby. Imagine my surprise.” Dressed head to toe in black, with a deadpan delivery and a fondness for sarcasm, Duchovny is a dark cloud in the Golden State. Or perhaps just bored.
He has been promoting the new series for months, and the expectation in America is huge — I pass at least five X-Files billboard posters and one life-size crashed UFO on my way from the airport to the hotel. Whatever the cause, he is in such a rush to get the interview over with that when his agent can’t find the room key he insists we start in the corridor.
Duchovny has published a bestselling book, written and recorded an album and starred in the hit television show Californication, as a sex-addicted writer (a character he resembles in more ways than one). But for millions of people around the world he will always be Fox Mulder.
It is hard to explain the appeal of The X-Files to someone who is not an X-phile — you either get it or you don’t. A typical episode pits Mulder and Scully against the Squeeze, a 400-year-old monster that fits in drainpipes and eats livers (it terrified me so much at the age of 14 that I spent two weeks sleeping in my sister’s bed). There have also been giant tapeworms and a murderous circus freak.
It always seemed to me that Duchovny was one of those who didn’t get it. He was sceptical when he first read the scripts: “I had very little interest in that type of show and that type of subject matter,” he says. He found the show’s success “surprising” and the global celebrity it gave him “freakish”.
When I ask if he struggles to feign enthusiasm in front of die-hard fans, he says: “I’m constitutionally unable to feign enthusiasm for anything” — a statement that I am rapidly discovering is all too true.
Duchovny’s problem is that he’s above all this: not just aliens and interviews, but the whole Hollywood circus. He was born and raised in New York, the son of a school administrator mother and a writer and publicist father, who worked for the American Jewish Committee. He went to Princeton, took a master’s degree in English literature from Yale and at 25 was in the process of doing a PhD when he decided he wanted to be an actor.
His parents were stunned. “It was not something that I had ever showed any interest in,” he says. “It wasn’t even like I was a movie buff or I don’t think I ever wanted to meet an actor.” He landed a few roles in ads and a brief but notable part as a transvestite detective in David Lynch’s TV series Twin Peaks, and then along came Mulder.
Even now acting is the last thing he wants to talk about. His mother is from Scotland, and when I ask if he is aware that it is Burns Night, he lights up instantly, calls her and recites several verses of Burns’s To a Mouse, word for word. He is a Democrat and a pescatarian and hates Los Angeles: “What is there to like?” He sighs. “It’s the bullshit factor.”
It wasn’t just the science fiction elements of the show that Duchovny struggled with but also his co-star. Fans became fixated with the idea that he and Anderson were a couple (many are still convinced), but both have revealed that they didn’t really like each other. They would film in Vancouver over 10½ months, with shoots lasting 12-14 hours. It was “a psychological experiment to gauge how quickly one can go insane”, he says.
To add to the tension, in a depressing show of Hollywood sexism Anderson was offered half Duchovny’s salary and instructed to walk behind him on camera. She forced her way into the hearts of the fans, only to find she’d been offered half his salary again for the comeback. Duchovny claims he was unaware of this and “surprised” to hear it.
This time around, though, their relationship is on a much better footing: “With Gillian and me, it feels more fun. We’ve long since left behind any kind of uneasiness with one another professionally or personally,” he says.
Part of the problem was that both stars were desperate to prove they could do more. When the final series ended in 2002, both scrambled to get as far away from The X-Files as possible. Anderson made London her home, starring in BBC adaptations of Bleak House and Great Expectations, while Duchovny landed the role of Hank Moody in Californication.
For someone who seems so resolutely un-Hollywood, it is odd that Duchovny’s private life has followed a well-worn Hollywood path. His marriage to the actress Téa Leoni — the couple have two children together — hit the rocks in 2008, when Duchovny was treated for sex addiction. They divorced in 2014.
It has led many viewers of Californication to assume that Hank’s trysts with porn stars and one-night stands with 16-year-olds are in some way autobiographical. His face clouds when I raise this. The similarities are “completely accidental and sometimes unfortunate”, he says. “I say unfortunate because I have a family and it’s not the kind of thing I want my kids exposed to. It’s painful.”
The truth, he adds, is that “I’m probably way more prudish than Hank Moody”. He is also curiously driven, “an introvert” who taught himself to act and someone who is “non-musical” who pushed himself to sing live on stage.
He is sensitive to criticism, avoids reviews and Twitter and has tried meditation and yoga as ways of “seeking out places where I can turn off some noise in my head”, he says. He also tried therapy but gave it up some time ago. “I used to but I don’t any more. I quit. I got enough. At some point you figure out the manual and then it’s on you.”
The career he seems most comfortable with is writing. “The only thing I always ever knew or thought of myself as was a writer,” he says. “That’s how I conceived of myself, for my identity — my dad was a writer.”
His first novel, Holy Cow, is about a talking cow called Elsie who wants to make it to India to avoid being eaten (her sidekicks are a turkey who wants to get to Turkey and a pig that wants to get to Israel). It is odd and surprisingly charming. He has already written his second, which he says is a “classic yarn novel” with “no talking animals”. The books are something of which he is obviously proud.
But being back in the world of conspiracy theories is a nostalgic experience; he thinks the time is right because the world has changed. “There have been so many revelations in the past couple of years of how easy it is to spy on people. We’ve all handed over our entire lives to the cloud, this information base that is hackable. Snowden has happened; WikiLeaks has happened,” he says. “We have come full circle in a way.”
The actor has too, and — who knows? — he may even enjoy it this time round.
The new series of The X-Files begins tomorrow on Channel 5 at 9pm
Source: Sunday Times / tumblr
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