What's a former Yale doctoral candidate doing in a place like this? After
125 episodes as Fox Mulder, the world's most paranoid F.B.I. agent, in the
Fox hit The X-Files, David Duchovny has 30 million fans and a brand-new
marriage to actress Téa Leoni, and earns $100,000 an episode. This
month he stars in the X-Files movie, the top-secret, $60 million,
special-effects-packed feature that addresses five years of X-Files
mysteries. Michael Shnayerson talk to the man who is and isn't Mulder.
In school, "I thought I was going to end
up in the gutter if I didn't get straight A's."
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He's with Scully at the end of a dark, dusty hallway. No hint of expression
crosses his face as she speaks. "You want to hear the latest?" she says,
deadpan herself. "Detective Pennock ran the gloves for blood-typing and found
two different samples. One type matching Marty Glenn's."
A flicker of curiosity appears, like a breeze on a glassy sea. Then his lips
move, though just barely, as he replies in a voice so soft I strain to hear
from 10 feet away. "She was examined. There were no cuts or wounds on her."
Never flustered, rarely shocked, he has the quiet cool of passions contained:
a haiku in human form. To give so little away, yet be so intriguing-is it
acting? Or is he just lucky enough to play a character as laconic as himself?
"Cut and print!"
Released again, the world's most paranoid F.B.I. agent, Fox Mulder, alias
David Duchovny, gives me a "Let's get out of here" look and heads down the
stairs of what is, in fact, an old bank building in downtown Vancouver, Canada.
Outside, he slips into a chauffeured four-by-four, past a claque of autograph
hunters, to ride the two blocks back to the alley where his double-wide trailer
is parked.
In the back of the car, Duchovny looks boyishly fresh, his face unlined at
37 and unembellished by stage makeup, his full head of dark hair unsullied,
as far as I can see, by a single strand of gray. He's very handsome, though
in a winsomely flawed way, his nose a bit too large, his grin slightly geeky:
not by chance does Mulder almost never smile. The key to his enormous television
appeal, and to Mulder's, is the mind behind the looks. Any other doctoral
candidate in English literature at Yale who dropped out to be an actor would
probably come across as smart. Duchovny is quick.
Which is why, after nearly 125 episodes of The X-Files, he's also
frustrated. "Doing the same part for five years, no matter how great the
part is, gets kind of boring," he admits. Over the course of a 12-hour workday,
the man who is Mulder will shuttle from set to trailer and back no fewer
than 20 times--sometimes to do a single line in a scene. At the end of two
such days, I will feel something I never expected to feel for a television
star who earns a reported $110,000 an episode: sympathy. This is a really
dreary way to spend the week.
Also, since this is Vancouver, it's raining. But Duchovny knows he can't
complain about the weather any more than he can about his schedule. As we
enter his trailer, he points to a color snapshot of a local strip club. The
marquee in the photo reads: DAVID DUCHOVNY IS BARRED. GO HOME. It's a reminder
of the citywide indignation he stirred last fall with an idle gibe on a
late-night talk show about Vancouver's "400 inches of rain a day."
Stripping off his suit jacket and button-down oxford to reveal a white T-shirt,
Duchovny slides into the 60s-style lounge chair where he waits out the breaks,
reading poetry (John Berryman, John Ashbery, and Wallace Stevens are favorites),
novels (he's currently enmeshed in Don DeLillo's Underworld), perhaps
some film criticism (a Pauline Kael omnibus is on the kitchen counter), or
just contemplating his lava lamp (even cerebral stars space out). In repose,
he's as low-key as Mulder. But as droll as comic Steven Wright.
"If I'd have been born in the Middle Ages
I would have died single. People died at 36!"
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"I used to think that if you ran through the rain you wouldn't get as wet,"
he says with a sigh. "But it's not true. It's a matter of how much ground
you cover. In fact, if you go faster, you're actually running into raindrops
that you would miss."
"So you actually get wetter?"
Duchovny gives me a look. "Well, no, you don't get wetter, because you're
out less time, but you're hitting more rain. You get the same amount overall.
You'd be the same amount of wet either way. I was depressed when I heard
that. I thought running through the rain really worked." A beat. "Science
really spoils your fun."
Science keeps trying to spoil Mulder's fun, too, but after five seasons it
hasn't begun to explain away the visiting aliens, vampires, mutants, and
other creatures that he and Scully, played by Gillian Anderson, encounter
as fellow agents checking out the F.B.I.'s "X Files"--those dealing with
paranormal activity. This month, science takes more of a battering as the
first big-screen version of The X-Files opens to generate new fears
of extraterrestrial invasion and government coverup. Star Trek seems
the obvious precedent, especially given the show's cultlike following of
"X-philes," who trade arcane details, trinkets, and heartthrob gossip at
X Files conventions. But Duchovny sets me straight. "There is no
precedent," he says. Star Trek was actually canceled after three years,
became a cult hit in reruns, then spawned the movies.
The X-Files, by comparison, reaches 20 million viewers-and that's
just on prime time Sunday night. As of last fall, its reruns also appear
seven days a week, and have consistently ranked first among hour-long shows
in syndication, thereby reaching another 10 million viewers. So the show
may be powered into orbit as a big-screen serial, each installment appearing
every three or four years like a brilliant, unexplained sighting in the night
sky. Or so Duchovny hopes. Then the show might end after one more season--even
though the contract he signed back when he was relatively unknown binds him
for two more seasons, the mention of which makes him wince. He would be free
at last to have a movie career, yet also keep the franchise alive. If reaction
to the X Files trailer is any indication, the movie may indeed be
big: at the first mention of Mulder, audiences at two theaters I happened
to be at erupted in spontaneous applause.
Duchovny's more immediate goal has just been realized. As of next season
the show will move to Los Angeles. Its creator, Chris Carter, made the decision
reluctantly, since the Canadian exchange rate and lower costs mean higher
profits. But both Duchovny and Anderson keenly wanted to bring the Vancouver
years to an end. "I could've kept the show there," Carter says. "There was
never an ultimatum." The movie just seemed to cap an era, and as Carter concedes,
"You want to keep the actors in a good environment." For Duchovny, L.A. was
home well before May 1997, when he married Téa Leoni, the lithe,
fine-boned actress who starred in 1996's Flirting with Disaster and
the recently released Deep Impact. Now the pull is that much greater.
From the kitchen counter, the two-way radio squawks. "David, you're on in
five. Tom's asking what's this new line and how do you want to say it?"
"I want to say, 'Even if the gloves fit, you must still acquit."'
A pause of obvious incomprehension from the other end. "O.K.... "
Duchovny rolls his eyes. "Canadians ... They don't get O.J. around here."
As a star who likes to write, Duchovny weighs in with more than line changes
and the occasional plot. Early on, he decided that a guy on a lonely quest
to learn if his sister had been abducted by aliens had better be cool,
buttoned-down, well spoken-sane in every respect but the one in which he
wasn't. Hence the laconic style. "A lot of the style has come from David,"
acknowledges Anderson, who plays Scully with similar understatement, "because
that's the way he works. But also, we're dealing with so much all the
time--aliens and maniacs and psychotics-that if we responded big every time,
it would be incredibly melodramatic and boring."
As the show took off, Duchovny helped imbue what might have been a mere sci-fi
drama with what he refers to, a bit self consciously, as its mythology--a
creative contribution that reportedly earns him a higher-than-scale piece
of syndication revenues, which seem likely to reach $1.5 million per episode.
A seminal influence was--and still is Joseph Campbell. "It isn't Campbell
specifically, but Campbell is a structural anthropologist--he's like
Levi-Strauss, boiling down all stories into archetypes," Duchovny says. "I
wanted Mulder to go through an archetypal journey: starting from a position
of innocence, which is one of trusting his father--the elders, in
mythology--being a good boy and a good son, to being an outcast, feeling
like his father is Darth Vader, then going to almost as innocent a phase,
in which he believes that everyone's a liar, and everyone's out to get him,
then maturing to a kind of enlightened cynicism."
As the movie opens, Mulder is in the last of those stages. He's come to believe
that all the U.F.O.'s and extraterrestrials he's seen may be nothing more
than hoaxes planned by government agents who are using him as a guinea pig.
Whereas Scully, the skeptic, thinks they may be real. Since the movie has
a budget of $60 million, much of it for special effects, it's a sure bet
that Mulder will rediscover his faith in the great beyond. "Part of that
is, you know, when you pay your eight dollars you want to see something,"
Duchovny says. "It's, like,'Show me some aliens, man.' "
The season's last episode sets up the plot, ending with a cliff-hanger as
tantalizing as that of any 1920s radio serial. "There seems to be some sort
of colonization plan by an alien force that certain shadow members of governments
across the world have been in cahoots with," Duchovny allows. The human
collaborators will get to oversee their soon-to-be-enslaved fellows; like
the French Vichy government, they justify their duplicity as pragmatism.
Meanwhile, there's dissension among the aliens: some are against colonizing
Earth. "Like anti-imperialists in America," Duchovny says. "So they've come
to Earth to warn certain people that the aliens aren't actually going to
hold to their bargain, even with the collaborators. They're going to exterminate
or enslave everybody." Mulder has to figure out what's true, and whom to
trust--those archetypal issues. And if the aliens do intend to conquer by
means of a virus that turns people into lizards, where's the anti-dote? ("I'm
on a roll," Duchovny says of his plot summation. "Usually I don't understand
it.") Before the film is over, many of the mysteries Mulder has pondered
on The X-Files will be reconsidered, starting with his sister's
disappearance. "It's the culmination, really, of five years of questions."
One question it won't answer is what Duchovny's range is as a movie star.
Before The X Files, he landed leads in quirky, low-budget films
(Kalifornia, The Rapture, Julia Has Two Lovers), modest
roles in two of Henry Jaglom's chatty, home-movie-style films
(Venice/Venice, New Year's Day), and one line in a smash hit
(in Working Girl, he says "Surprise!" to Melanie Griffith at a birthday
party). In all of them, the physical appeal is palpable (aided by ample exposure
of his yoga-hard body), as is the intelligence behind those dark, brooding
eyes. But his presence is pretty much the same from role to role. Not wooden,
not stiff, just restrained.
If The X Files were an L.A.-based ensemble TV show that left its stars
enough time to do films, Duchovny might have managed to break the stereotype
by now. But with those 12-hour days in Vancouver, and a window of only six
weeks between seasons, he's been stymied. Last year he let a half-baked script
and the right schedule lure him into a disappointment called Playing
God, about a doctor who lost his license for malpractice and ends up
on call for the Mob. Though the movie had other problems, Duchovny did little
to alleviate them: most critics saw him as Mulder in a medical smock. Now
the X Files movie will give him his greatest Hollywood exposure by
far--while typecasting him all the more. "At first we worried a lot about
how to make the film better than the show," Anderson says of their roles.
"Soon enough, we found that wasn't appropriate: it was about doing what we
had been doing."
Why some TV actors can make the leap to film and others fail is one of those
eternal riddles Duchovny professes not to ponder. "We can talk ourselves
blue in the face about the differences between TV actors and movie actors,"
he says, "and it's all bullshit, because I'm an actor on TV or film, depending
on the form. It's all voodoo." Still, there must be some reason Woody Harrelson
and Bruce Willis have made it and David Caruso and Luke Ferry haven't so
far. Something about emotional range? "It's the material," Duchovny says
a bit testily. "[Caruso's] a good actor. He deserves success as much as anybody."
A mobile phone rings: Duchovny's wife is on the line. The call is local.
With Deep Impact wrapped, Leoni is up in Vancouver for the week. "This
reporter wants to know how I become a movie actor," he says. "Can you tell
me?" He listens, interested. "Uh-huh... uh-huh... Right. O.K." Then he looks
over at me. "She says you take everything you do on television and then you
make it slower and longer," he says.
So much for that.
It was a year ago January that Duchovny and Leoni began dating. They'd met
once before, when both were starting out, at a pre-interview for The Tonight
Show, in which, as relative unknowns, they had to prove they were charming
enough to be on-air guests. Leoni dominated the interview, while Duchovny
grew silent and sullen. She got on the show; he didn't. One fall day in 1996,
Leoni was in the office of her agent, Risa Shapiro of International Creative
Management, when Duchovny called. Shapiro is his agent, too.
"I said to him that I was talking to Téa Leoni," Shapiro recalls,
"and then they both spoke at the same time.'Oh, he must be so annoyed with
me because I talked so much at the pre-interview,' Téa said. And David
said,'Is she still talking so much?' I was like the translator. I got off
the phone and said, 'This is a match made in heaven.' Not only were they
both funny and talented, they were both from New York." Both, that is, from
prestigious New York private schools, he from Collegiate, she from its sister
school, Brearley--though not, as it happened, from the same social worlds.
Leoni was wary of dating Duchovny, who'd managed to gain a reputation in
L.A. as a ladies' man. But Shapiro nudged matters along. She urged Duchovny
to go to a party Leoni would be attending in L.A. He arrived just as Leoni
was leaving. "That went well," he said to Shapiro. A few weeks later, the
two had dinner in L.A. Things went better. Three months after that, Duchovny
asked her to marry him. "I still ask her," he says. "It's our little thing."
"Are there any movies you wish you had been in?"
The idea of marriage hadn't exactly spooked Duchovny. "I just couldn't function
successfully in a relationship," he says. "If I'd been born in the Middle
Ages I would have died single. People died at 36!" Certainly his own parents'
bitter divorce, when he was 11, had left its scars. Leoni has parents who
have been married happily for more than 40 years. So, as Duchovny observes,
'she's made happy by simple things in life, like family, things that I was
never made happy by. She's teaching me that." He pauses. "Well, by example.
It's not like we study every night."
The newlyweds chose to forgo a honeymoon; just living together was an exotic
enough prospect. Duchovny moved into Leoni's rental house in L.A. with his
dog, Blue, a "Border/Jersey-collie mix" who got along well enough with George,
Leoni's larger mutt. The problem was a dog somewhere in the neighborhood
who barked incessantly through the night every night. "We got in the car
at night and tried to locate it aurally, like by sonar," Duchovny relates.
With Leoni at the wheel of her BMW sedan (Duchovny, car-wary, didn't learn
to drive until he was 27), they found the dog, and then confronted the owner.
"Oh, you'll get used to it," the owner said. "I did."
Instead, they bought their own house north of Malibu-high enough in the hills
not to have been swept away by Fl Niño. Leoni set about filling it
with antiques, many from her brother, Tom, a dealer. Duchovny isn't sure
quite what style they are. "We like green, comfortable things," he says,
trying to be helpful. "Green and yellow." By then The X Files had resumed;
the first time he flew down from Vancouver to visit Leoni in their new home,
he felt like a stranger in it. "I didn't want to touch anything," he says.
"But then you spill that first cup of coffee, and you're in ... " Soon, the
schedule, which allowed him to get home only every other week--"there were
a couple of stretches of, like, 17 days; those were bad"--began to seem
intolerable. "I had to become fairly active in getting the show moved," Duchovny
says. In the end, diplomacy worked. But if it hadn't? "If I'd had to force
it, I would have found a way to make it happen."
"It's raining--yeah!"
Leoni enters the trailer with a large white plastic bag in either hand. Inside
is food enough for six, courtesy of the local spa where she has just undergone
hours of rejuvenation that culminated in being slathered, naked, with warm
seaweed. "It was great," she reports. For the food, she gets no takers: lunch
was already served on the set. Undeterred, she stands at the kitchen counter
and digs into half a dozen plastic containers full of whole-grain salads
and other spa food. This is a woman who loves to eat and clearly has the
metabolism to do it without adding an ounce to her lean, five-foot-eight-inch
frame.
"Téa loves the rain," Duchovny says. And Duchovny, it's very clear,
loves his wife. "What's that moment you love in the W C. Fields movie?"
"Oh yeah," she says. "I may have dreamt it. But he was in the hospital and
he was going to die; it was very sad. His girlfriend or wife or whatever
says goodbye and leaves--and oh, the thing is, we know he loves the rain.
So he's sort of sleeping, and we're crying because we know he's going to
die. And then he hears the sound of rain on the hospital roof. The camera
pulls back and we're outside, and here's this woman--with a hose."
"Michael just said we have a 19th-century relationship because we got married
without knowing each other," Duchovny teases.
Leoni pauses, her fork in midair. "David and I both tend to be sort of...
heady individuals," she says, serious for a moment. "To have put that aside
and gone with an instinct, and had it turn out to be so brilliantly right--I
now applaud it."
Eighteen months ago, divorced after a marriage of three years from a director
of TV commercials, Leoni couldn't have imagined she'd marry again. "I didn't
have a good reason the first time, and look how that ended," she says. "And
I hadn't come up with one since. I even had in my head, I think, the ideal
man, and I still wasn't sure he could get me to the altar. But I didn't meet
my ideal man--I met better. At that point it was so specific. Would I ever
get married again? No. Would I marry David? Yes. And the speed with which
we got married ... I don't know ... "
"I was always a little embarrassed when people would bring it up," Duchovny
says, smiling. "I'm glad we've been married almost a year now, because that
feels ... substantial."
"I kind of like the method of 'Hide and watch, we'll see you in 25,"' says
Leoni.
"We like that method about everything," says Duchovny.
Hide and watch?
"Don't defend yourself, just hide and watch," Duchovny explains.
"It's a Texas thing," says Leoni. "My mother used to say that all the time.
She'd say that particularly when you were in trouble: 'Hide and watch.' Meaning,
just get out of sight and don't mess ... "
After a short stretch of banter that manages to cover rats, regurgitation,
excretion, and sutured penises--these are newlyweds who like grossing each
other out--Leoni polishes off the second of two chocolate crullers and gathers
up the empty containers. "All right, I'm going home to nap," she declares.
"And then I'm probably going to drink! It'll just be a perfect day!" She
nods over to Duchovny. "What time are you going to be home?"
Duchovny sighs. "Maybe eight? Tell him how hard I work. Because it doesn't
sound good when I say it."
"No, it doesn't," Leoni agrees. "But it's true. I don't work one-fifth as
hard as he does."
Much of the last year Leoni spent filming episodes of her own TV show, a
sitcom called The Naked Truth, which unfortunately was just canceled.
Her schedule was lighter than Duchovny's, especially when a day's script
had lousy jokes and had to be scrapped. The next day, though, she might have
had to memorize 45 new pages.
"She's pretty photogenic," Duchovny says, then hears his mistake and cracks
up. "No, I mean, she's got a photographic memory."
"Go with the first one," Leoni says.
"She has a photogenic mammary," Duchovny amends.
"Are you going to want dinner?" Leoni asks.
"I'll just have some of that soup you made when I come home."
Leoni pauses. "Did that give you gas?"
"Not more than usual."
"I made this soup," Leoni explains, "and I didn't soak the beans overnight
... "
"Actually, it did."
"But I didn't tell him that."
"It did, it did give me gas."
Fond embrace, kiss; Leoni Exits trailer door, right.
For both Duchovny and Leoni, one of the worst parts of long-distance marriage
is the flying. It makes both of them nervous. Once a month, as written into
his contract, Duchovny gets a private plane for the weekend round-trip to
L.A. But that's almost worse.
"I feel safer on the big ones," he says. "Because I have this feeling that
it's a cooperative act to keep the plane aloft. Everybody has to concentrate.
And if it's just me back there, it's exhausting. Like, if I don't keep vigilant,
it will all go to hell."
In that respect, life was easier before The X Files. "Whenever I used
to get on a plane in L.A. that had a celebrity on it, I was happy," Duchovny
recalls. "Because I thought that was the charm. Then I realized I had become
the charm--for other people. I wasn't as happy about that. Because if the
plane started to go down, they'd all give me looks of 'You're not even enough!"'
Jokes tell: that fear, of not being enough, is what drove a boy who hadn't
yet grown into his handsome looks to be an academic overachiever. It's what
drives him as an actor now, too.
Duchovny's father, Amram, was a publicist who wrote gimmicky books for money
(The Wisdom of Spiro T Agnew and an Off Broadway play (The Trial
of Lee Harvey Oswald). The gambits apparently failed: David and his
siblings--a brother, Danny, and a sister, Lori--grew up in what was then
a pretty scruffy Manhattan neighborhood, on 11th Street off Second Avenue.
When David entered Collegiate in ninth grade on a scholarship, he was christened
"Hayseed" because he lived so far from his wealthy uptown classmates (including
John E Kennedy Jr.). When he went to his first party, he was astounded to
see the elevator door open directly into a classmate's opulent apartment;
he'd never seen anything like it. Leoni, six years younger, wouldn't have
been at the party, but this was her world. She lived on Park Avenue; her
father was a partner in a New York law firm.
By then, Duchovny's parents had divorced, and times were tougher. To earn
the $600 needed every year to supplement his scholarship, Duchovny worked
as a lifeguard on Fire Island, where his grandparents had a summer house
in Ocean Beach. During the school year, he studied hard. "I always felt,
If I go out tonight, I'11 get a C in math," he recalls. "I was nervous. I
thought I was going to end up in the gutter if I didn't get straight A's."
Much of this was the influence of his mother, a teacher and administrator
at Manhattan's Grace Church School. She had, as Duchovny puts it, "that
Depression-era, lower-middle-class fantasy of the educated life, the life
of a professor." Even the basketball he excelled at was a means to the end
of getting into an Ivy League college.
Surely, I ask, he did one reckless thing in his Collegiate years. Duchovny
pauses. "My best friend, Jason Beghe, and I, used to think that we had a
chance with the lower-school teachers because they were always relatively
young," he says. "So we used to sit in the lounge area of the cafeteria,
and Jason used to take his down jacket off, the kind you could crush into
a pretty small shape, and he used to stuff it down his pants, so it looked
like his penis went down to his ankle, and was the size of an elephant cock.
We'd sit there as they went by. And his expression when he was doing it was:
'It's not a coat."'
As his class valedictorian, with board scores of 690 in both math and English,
Duchovny got into Harvard, Yale, Princeton, and Brown. Harvard was out be
cause his father had moved to Boston, and the proximity would have upset
his mother. (Duchovny's father has since moved to Paris.) Yale he nixed because
New Haven looked even worse than East 11th Street. Brown at the time was
seen as less good than the other three. That left Princeton, where Duchovny
studied English and roomed with a student who, to Duchovny's amazement, wanted
to act. "I used to tease him relentlessly.'You got into Princeton to study
acting? What are you, an idiot?'"
Working hard--a nervous boy still--Duchovny graduated summa cum laude and
went on to earn a graduate degree in contemporary literature at Yale. He
was a second-year teaching assistant, starting classes for his doctorate,
when Jason Beghe made a fateful suggestion. Duchovny needed to earn $2,000
during the summer of 1987 for school-year expenses, and was bartending. Beghe,
an actor who has since appeared in Thelma & Louise and G.I.
Jane, pointed out that if Duchovny landed a single commercial he could
make that much money in a day. "I'd known him already 12 years," Beghe says.
"Everything he set out to do, he did. And if I loved him, why wouldn't everyone
else?"
With an agent, and some acting lessons, Duchovny landed a Löwenbräu
commercial. Before long, to his mother's lasting regret, he let Yale, and
academia, go.
The radio squawks: "David in five." A change of clothes is needed, so Duchovny
strips down in his trailer bedroom. He favors dusty-rose Jockey shorts--a
factoid for the fans who swooned at the sight of him, in one episode, in
a tight red Speedo bathing suit, and crowded various David Duchovny Web sites
with feverish speculation about what might lie underneath. It's strange to
be a sex symbol; and Duchovny's wariness of it seems genuine. In the recent
Milan Kundera novel Slowness, Duchovny recalls, "there was a question
one of the characters posed: 'Who would want to drag the pots and pans of
celebrity behind him?' I feel that way when I walk down the street, like
I've got these pots and pans."
The Internet groups are easier to avoid than paparazzi or autograph hunters:
Duchovny is Internet-oblivious. Once, though, he admits, "I was at my manager's
office, and I said, 'Let's go visit some site about me.' I forget which one
it was, some chat room. I logged on and said,'Hi, it's David Duchovny. Anybody
want to talk?' First of all they just ignored me, because I guess they get
people like that all the time. So I typed, 'It really is David--please ask
me a question so I can prove it's me.' They were, like, 'Get out of here,
asshole.' And I realized I could never convince them it was me. If I came
up with something they already knew, they'd think I was just another fan
who'd learned it like they had. And if I came up with something they didn't
know, they would think it was a lie anyway."
In a sense, the same Catch-22 dogs Duchovny as an actor. His work as Mulder
is, to his mind, proof of his talent. But so well has he done Mulder that
until he plays an utterly different character few will believe he isn't Mulder,
even when he's David Duchovny. And with the kind of acting he does, he admits,
the gradations are always going to be subtle.
"If I have a morality about performance, it's kind of a Protestant one,"
Duchovny says. "It's not celebratory; sometimes I wish it was more that way.
When I look at my wife I see a physical expression of acting that is fun.
Or when I look at an actor like Al Pacino or Nicolas Cage or John Travolta.
And given the chance, I'd like to try that, because I recognize the joy in
the performance. But my natural inclination is to keep it real, and to try
at all costs to hide, which is what people do [in real life]."
Some people get it. A lot still don't. "When I got the success of this show,
I thought that people would start to appreciate what I was doing," says Duchovny.
"Instead of being called 'flat,' I'd be called 'subtle.' Instead of being
called 'low-energy,' I'd be called 'real.' But every time you try to move
out, you're going to be attacked again. That's where my battle is: in either
listening to them and deciding, 'Gee, they're right, there's something I
have to do here that I'm not doing,' or sticking to my guns."
"David, we need you," the radio squawks.
Duchovny slips on his shirt and jacket, opens an umbrella at the door, and
heads out to his waiting car. It's been a long day, and where he'd like to
be is with Leoni, eating a quiet dinner. But the alien forces are gathering
even now, out there beyond the rain-gray Vancouver skies. And who, if not
Mulder, is to stop them?
Shnayerson, Michael. June, 1998. "David Duchovny's X Factor."
Vanity Fair Magazine.
