From GQ, January 1997

Darkman
by Allison Glock
Photographs by Lance Staedler

Chasing the unknown week after week on The X-Files is bound to make a guy
feel a little, well, alienated. But David Duchovny has always been different.

Backstage at the Lilith Fair women's concert in Vancouver, David Duchovny is listening intently as Emmylou Harris sings "Goodbye." His feet tap a bit, nothing too overt, just enough to keep him from looking stiff. he mouths the words: "'Somewhere in there I'm sure I made you cry./ But I can't remember if we said goodbye.'" Behind hind disgruntled stagehands grouse, "Who does this guy thing he is? Moses?" Duchovny doesn't hear. His heart is breaking.

"'Was I just off somewhere or maybe just too high?/ But I can't remember if we said goodbye.'" Besides him singer Lisa Loeb, last year's Jewel, also tries to watch Emmylou. But her eyes wander. She keeps looking at Duchovny in his slim jeans and madras anorak, tennis shoe tapping. And when he bends down slightly to praise Steve Early or the veiny-armed bass player or utter the inevitable wry observation, she tilts her head to his a little too quickly, leans in a little too far, so she is almost unbalanced, needing to touch his waist to steady herself.

Not that you can blame her. Duchovny is, after all, a muscled ball of complexity and charm--not a simple star, like the unavoidably agreeable Michael J. Fox, but a celebrity as murky as swamp water, the anti-Carrey. He is, at 36, the brooding lit-crit professor, the tortured bard, the rumpled intellectual you want to seduce, to skate out of his brainiac exile. In short, a magnet for artsy chicks.

He is also, like the character he's best know for, FBI Agent Fox Mulder of 'The X-Files,' vaguely disturbing. He is, like almost every character he's played--a hostage to killers('Kalifornia'), a biker touched by God ('The Rapture'), a transvestite ('Twin Peaks')--uneasy. Unlike Mulder, who is an innocent among thieves, he does manipulate, but artfully, subtly and so skillfully that you don't blame him. In fact, you're honored he bothered. He is a dark and stormy knight, which, as any woman will tell you, is far more compelling than that white-tight guy on the horse. "That song will wreck you," he says, his face squinched slightly. Loeb nods. She feels his pain.

When Emmylou has finished her set. Duchovny exits, but not before Loeb promises to meet him and his party for dinner. And, of course, she does. Showered and lipsticked, wearing a short jumper and a teddy-bear backpack. She comes because he asked her to.

David Duchovny is getting spat on. he's shooting an 'X-Files' episode on the industrial back lots of Vancouver. The episode is one he is particularly proud of, in which he regresses into past lives and gets to break out of the repressed, deadpan savior mold and explore more animated personalities. The spiter is another regressor he is trying to save.

"I envy people who walk into new situations thinking, 'Hey, a new environment--I get to make new friends, have fun.' Me, I'm like, 'A new environment--I'm going to be humiliated. Better work hard.'"

"I gave her my spit to use so I won't get any new diseases," he jokes. Between takes, he plays with the ever present Blue, his Benji-ish mutt, who, in truth, isn't very cute. Duchovny kicks her ball straight toward her head. Bam! She catches it in her teeth. He does it again, a cannonball fired from his toe. Again she snags it, tail wagging. He wants to take her on Letterman. He is that bewitched. Playing with the dog is one of the few times he relaxes on the set; an exception to his usual droll, enclosed stance. "I'm lucky if I get a hello in the morning," says an assistant producer. "He doesn't say much."

He comes by this understatement naturally. It is easy to hang low when you're the brightest person in the room, when you can make the right people laugh and the rest feel stupid. Not that he tries to make them feel stupid. It's just that, Christ, they didn't get the allusion.

Like Mulder, Duchovny is serious, even when he's being jocose. A chuckler, not a laugher. A man who ponders. It's made him a cult hero to thousands of X-philes and a stud to smart women weary of bimbos like Tom Cruise. Duchovny's popularity both flatters and alarms him.

"I don't want to be a fashion. I don't want to be a joke," he says, stroking Blue's head. "I didn't ask for it. It's just my nature to try to win so that I don't lose. I have to always breathe and relax and recognize that it doesn't matter whether you win or lose. It's hard. The world doesn't believe it. It's a trophy-giving world, an award-giving world, a salary-lookin-at world."

Of course, even by that tainted measure, David Duchovny is a success. He is rich. Richer than the highest-paid academic, the career he considered while working on his Yale Ph.D. thesis, "Magic and Technology in Contemporary American Fiction and Poetry," before he abandoned the thesis and started hanging out at the drama school. Instead, he has become the professor who teaches the television audience, the highbrow of lowbrow, except, as he's quick to point out, he is not an "ac -tor," and Andre Braugher type who emotes like water from a fire hose. Nor is he a goof, like the Friends friends who crinkle their brows and call it comedy.

He is in between, a man trying to act by not acting, a jaded relativist playing a hopeful believer, a cerebral man playing a cerebral man on a television show, a guy who reads John Ashbery and Dorothy Allison, a man of depth in a gravely shallow pool.

He is exceptional in the real world, an aberration in L.A. An Ivy League pop-culture icon. Ralph Nader meets James Dean. A silver tray serving Twinkies. His fame is the only prosaic thing about him. His nose sits a tad too close to his mouth. His eyes are a wince too small. His hair is bark brown, straight, no hint of a cocky cowlick or a foppish flop. His frame is a happy medium. He walks with his round rear slightly turned under, a deliberately casual stride. A hint of shuffle but mostly an inverted strut. his legs are a wee bit too thin. And yet, thanks to an innate allure, his visage transcends "Yeah, so?" to become striking - to such an extent that 85 percent of the Internet offerings pertaining to David Duchovny fall under the heading "David Duchovny is a fox!" Which he is, in the same way that Sharon Stone is an actress, by sheer force of will.

As Duchovny hails a cab, a tall blonde woman coming into the hotel eyes him and says, "I thought you'd be taller." He looks at her. "I can be."

It shows mostly in his eyes, which he wields like numchucks, drawing you in, then knocking you out. When he talks to you, he stares, pupil to pupil, not like a pit bull sensing a challenge but more like a pit bull imagining you in his feed bowl.

"You work so hard and so long that you start believing the illusion that what you're doing is important," he says, staring. 'TV is the national theater. It is important. I don't think I'm important. I'm ambitious but innocent, in a way. I don't want to be an archetype. I'm not Hollywood. Am I?"

Well, no, but he does reside in a Malibu beach house and, like it or not, has an air of confidence that could be interpreted as smugness and most probably is by folks too brittle to withstand his gaze and his slow-boil witticisms. He radiates an aura of superiority that permeates those around him and leaves them either similarly uplifted (even Blue seems to wonder why other dogs are sniffing her ass) or as insecure as pubescents toking their first joint. And he is smart - Oscar Wilde, Dorothy Parker, switchblade smart.

Despite all this, he's uncomfortable, fidgety, not a man of bone-deep royalty, supremacy by entitlement, but a bootstrapper, a poor kid who used to deliver pot roasts in Chelsea, in New York, after his dad left him and his mother, older brother and younger sister when Duchovny was 11. "I probably grew up with a lot less money than a lot of people who try and pass themselves off as street kids," he says. "I worked as a delivery boy for a meat market. An old French woman ran the store. She made me clean the rotisserie. I think that's where my aversion to schmaltz came from."

From meat schlepper, he graduated to Fire Island lifeguard - "I was the youngest that year to pass my civil servant's exam. It was a hard test" - then on to New York's' Collegiate prep school (through a scholarship), where he shared classes with John-John and tried to perfect himself.

All went as planned until senior year, when, for an unknown reason, "I fainted and fell on my face in school." Teeth busted, he lay in intensive care for a few days while tests were run. "They didn't know why I fainted. I was so normal, it was weird that that would have happened." Now he knows. "As I've come to look back on it, I was captain of the basketball team and the baseball team and a straight-A student, and I was in my last year of high school, and I'd applied to four schools - Harvard, Yale, Princeton, and Brown - and I got into all of them. And I was kind of, like, overachieving on every level. My father had left only five or six years earlier, which I don't think I was dealing with. And I think I just kinda checked out. But I happened to check out in a bad place, where I fell on my face."

He remembers one Latin teacher, "the one teacher who didn't kiss my ass because I was a scholarship student and a good student and a great athlete," the one teacher who "was really tough on me, always barking at me, accusing me of not listening. And of all the teachers who - I don't want to say made use of me, but who allowed me to overachieve without wondering what was going on inside, he was the only one who came to visit me in the hospital. He came and he stood by my bed and he said, 'No matter what the say, don't come back until you're ready.' And I was like, "what the fuck is he talking about? Years later, after he died, I realized he was the only one who knew that I needed help and rest and people to lay off me. I wish I could tell him, 'Hey, I finally got it, and thanks.'"

The woman watching Duchovny is limp with anticipation. She is a reporter and, judging from her posture, either in love or painfully hungry She is part of a Japanese press conference being held at midnight in the antiseptic meeting room of the Garden Hotel, in downtown Vancouver. She and about twenty other reporters have traveled from Japan with no guarantee of meeting Duchovny. Still, they came, replete with television cameras, lights and posters of Agent Mulder as rendered by Japanese cartoonists. In Japan, Duchovny is a bigger star than Cruise, Schwarzenegger or Gibson. He is the biggest.

When he arrives after a fourteen-hour shoot, still wearing Mulder's suit, they applaud. He returns the favor by introducing himself in Japanese. They applaud again. And so it goes for an hour.

"Do you receive help from the FBI on the show?"

"When I was on celebrity Jeopardy..."

"Yes, yes, Stephen King..."

"...a guy in the audience was in the FBI, and he told me that you don't have to die every time you get shot. Which is good. Isn't it?"

Laughter.

"Are there any movies you wish you had been in?"

"Last Tango in Paris, The Last Temptation of Christ." Beat. "Anything with the word last in it."

Laughter.

He answers every question thoughtfully, looks each reporter in the eye, refers to their comments throughout the conference. He has an instant ease, a spot-on shorthand with people he barely knows. He remember names. And in turn, they fell special to have been remembered - quoted, even - by such a man.

The press conference ends, and Duchovny saunters over to meet the journalist personally. The hungry-looking woman's hands shake. He pretends not to notice and asks her casual questions about her hotel, the weather, is she having a good time? She nods he nods, then moves on to the next reporter.

Finally, they swarm, dissolving into fandom, all pretense of objectivity abandoned. The scene becomes less press conference than movie premiere. Duchovny works through the pack, smooth as Clinton, all smiles and charisma. No question is too inane, no compliment too gratuitous. On he presses, until the last reporter has been touched. He does not turn off until he is in the elevator, and then it is like a candle being snuffed out.

His shoulders slump. The smile evaporates. He looks anxiously for his driver. He is exhausted, and yet he does not go home. He wants to have a drink, to relax in a local hotel bar. And as he enters, the staring and whispering and hand shaking begin anew.

"My mother is a very hard worker. I learned will from her. I'm a really, really hard worker. Just the fact that I can do this job day in and day out, and prepare, and take it seriously, do my homework. My father was more playful, less in the world, less ambitions, more cerebral, more out of it. I'm diffuse but intense, so I'm a combination of both of them."

He is joking, and yet he is big on such distinctions, a holdover from dissecting literature, from living in an exacting home. He is spiritual, not religious; an aficionado, not an addict; a man who has joy but not fun, trepidation but not fear, tolerance but not patience.

He has a handful of "real friends," people he trusts, one of whom is the similarly abstruse actor Michael Massee, who was first struck by Duchovny on-screen at the Berlin Film Festival. "He was in this movie where he was calling women on the phone and trying to seduce them," says Massee. They became fast friends.

Massee plays the foil to Duchovny's latest antihero, a drug-addled doctor, in the upcoming movie Playing God. Not surprisingly, Massee describes Duchovny's take on the role as "low-key."

"You know, you see him acting, and it's like he's doing nothing. He's very minimalistic. He dares to be boring," says Massee. "I think he handles the fame thing really well. I don't see it changing him much. But I would find it lonely to do what he does. IT cuts you off from normal relationships."

It is late on a Saturday night, and Duchovny is dropping Massee, in town for a guest spot on The X-Files, at his hotel. As he enters the lobby, he runs into an old friend/ Actually, he is spotted, and for a second appears trapped like a snagged fox, but then he relaxes, a wave of cool The young woman is tremulous and grows more so as they talk. He, in turn becomes calmer, an ocean of Zen, surfing her distress as she drowns. Massee turns away.

Minutes later they part. She scurries back to the bar. Duchovny, looking spent, smiles slightly. Instead of staying for a drink, he decides to go home. As he hails a cab, a tall blond woman coming into the hotel eyes him and says, "I thought you'd be taller."

He looks at her. "I can be."

"People don't really change. They just peel back layers, and you see what they're really like." Duchovny is sitting on the stairs outside the X-Files set, drinking wheatgrass extract, a "purifying" liquid resembling antifreeze. He is talking about how he is finally ready for a family. "It's the first time. I never wanted one before. I didn't' even want my own. But now I've taken my ticket. I'm in line. I know in my heart it's not bullshit. I want to feather the nest."

With whom, he won't say. Getting Duchovny to talk about love is like trying to pry open an oyster with a Popsicle stick.

"I had an adviser in graduate school who said, 'Would you rather go one place with a hundred women or a hundred places with one woman?' And I said, "how about thirty-three places with three women?' Now I realize that's what happens. You go to the same place again and again, and it's fruitless. So I'd rather go a hundred places with one woman. The choices are kind of numbing. I'm not a believer in the "there's a right woman'

Glock, Allison. January 1997. "Darkman." GQ.