From SciFi TV Magazine, October, 1998
Transcribed by alfornos on alt.fan.david-duchovny

Prince of Paranoia
by Ian Spelling

David Duchovny still enjoys playing the alienated Fox Mulder

Fox Mulder is a loser.

"He IS a loser," insists David Duchovny, who obviously should know. "Basically, Mulder just NEVER succeeds. He doesn't get what he wants. He doesn't win fist fights. He doesn't get the girl. I like him as a hero because I always intended to play him as a guy who doesn't win, but who SEEMS to win. That is, I think, a difficult thing to do. People at home see that Mulder is right, so it's all kind of skewed in his favor. They've seen what he sees. They know that he's right, that his quest is good and moral. In that sense, he's more of a straight-up hero. In the world and in his job, though, he never really succeeds."

Some people, perhaps as many as 20 million - the number of viewers who tune in to The X Files each week on TV - would beg to differ. To devoted X-philes, Mulder is the prince of paranoia, a guy who inexplicably stays one step ahead of the Grim Reaper, the yin to Dana Scully's (Gillian Anderson) yang, a man on a mission who ultimately wins little battles in an unwinnable war. Small screen? Big screen? It doesn't matter to Duchovny. "He's still Mulder, even after the movie. I'm pleased with the direction he has been going in. It has been five years now plus a movie, and it'll probably go a year or two more," he notes. "But the character is set. The way he has been written, the way I've developed him, I'm fine with it.

"I liked the idea that Mulder lost his faith for a while, but it has to be legitimate and not just a trick or a conceit. I felt that during the fifth year it played as a bit of a superficial turn. Suddenly, Mulder lost his faith and, suddenly, he got it back. I would have preferred if it had been a season-long descent, with something cataclysmic occurring to help him get his faith back. It's restored in the movie, and what happened there was plenty cataclysmic, but it wasn't consistently handled on the show. I thought it was a good idea, but it was just managed unevenly."

The X Files: Fight the Future, the long-awaited big-screen saga, descended into movie theaters in mid-June.

As expected, it asked as many questions as it answered. Mulder and Scully bared their souls to each other, nearly resulting at one point in that oft-anticipated, oft-feared kiss. Audiences learned more about the infamous black oil, alien-human hybridization, the Syndicate and the Elders, but were still left to wonder about Samantha Mulder, Fox's sister, who was abducted years earlier by aliens and whose plight fueled Fox's tireless quest for the truth.

The film also partially explained why no one just puts a bullet in Mulder's head in order to keep him, a lowly peon in the vast government food chain, from digging too deep into the "mythology" of the Syndicate/alien conspiracy, but left out Krycek (Nick Lea), the Bounty Hunter (Brian Thompson) and Mrs. Mulder. As Duchovny points out, however, the first film actually did as much as it could. "I think we achieved the right balance, but that's not really for me to say. I'm sure there will be some bellyaching," he acknowledges. "There always is. We're the kind of show that inspires a lot of debate and fanatic loyalty. You can't please everybody. But I think we did a pretty good job.

"The alien truth is less important to me as an actor, as a storyteller, than Mulder's truths. Like the truth about his family history, exactly what happened to his sister, who Cigarette Smoking Man [William B. Davis] is to him, what happened with this father, why he's driven to figure out these things, and what effect these answers will have on him. It's not so important to me to say, 'I told you so. Aliens DO exist.' I want to know what they did with Samantha. I want to know what my father did. Was he a good guy or a bad guy? Any questions a son would have about his father, Mulder has and wants to know about. Did his mother have an affair with Cigarette Smoking Man? He's almost like Hamlet in that sense. As an actor and a person, these questions are much more interesting to me. They're more interesting to me than, 'We saw an alien and he had this shaped head, like the ones in ALIENS, not like the ones in INDEPENDENCE DAY.' That's less imprtant to me than the emotional story. The X Files stands perfectly as a first film. It's number one in a series. If we had addressed too may more emotional and personal issues, it wouldn't have worked. IF there is a next one, hopefully, we'll do some more personal stuff."

Duchovny notes that he had a good time making the movie. He enjoyed the action and, once he got used to it, the markedly slower pace of doing a feature. He liked Carter's script and the direction of Rob Bowman, a TV X Files veteran. He relished the dynamic between Mulder and Scully, particularly the romantic tease, though he's not so sure that aspect should be explored too much more in the future. The near-miss kiss was enough. "It's one of those moments where you don't get what you want, but you're kind of satisfied anyway," he says. "That's a weird feeling."

Of the films' guest stars, Duchovny didn't share scenes with Armin Mueller-Stahl as the Syndicate's impatient Strughold and had only the briefest of moments with Blythe Danner as FBI Assistant Director Jana Cassidy. However, Duchovny did go nose-to-nose with Martin Landau, who played Dr. Alvin Kurtzweil, the Deep Throat-like informant who convinced Mulder that the Dallas bombing was no terrorist act, but an effort to camouflage, among other things, the fact that the bodies found in the rubble were those of a boy and three firemen who were already dead (thanks to the black oil).

"Martin had a lot of dialogue that's of a kind usually reserved for myself or Gillian, where we just go on and on and on with big words, conspiracy theories, dates, terms and all that kind of crap. He just attacked it and did a really good job with it," Duchovny says of the Oscar winner. "We were working nights. It was a difficult shoot. Many of Martin's scenes were done during a week of nights. It would be 6 a.m. and he would be trying to get these complicated lines down. But he never gave up. He couldn't live with himself if he didn't acquit himself well. And he really delivered, too. I was very impressed."

Duchovny and Anderson now find themselves in new environs - Los Angeles, specifically - as they begin filming the sixth season.

Duchovny never hid his preference for leaving behind Vancouver, British Columbia, where the show shot its first five years. He wanted to be near home, and he wanted to be with his newlywed wife, actress Téa (Deep Impact) Leoni. How that change in locales will affect the series and its overall look remains to be seen.

The actor has already touched on a few thoughts about season five in commenting on Mulder's faith. As for other specifics, he ranks the episodes Chinga and Kill Switch, penned respectively by Stephen King and William Gibson (with Tom Maddox), as solid outings. "I think that both King and Gibson are coming back this season. That's good," Duchovny notes. "I liked their shows. I was hoping Quentin Tarantino would get to direct one. Maybe that will still happen. I can't really think of other writers that I would like to have write for The X Files. I wish we had Darin Morgan back. I wish we could get Glen Morgan and James Wong back. Those guys did some of our best episodes. We've had good writers on staff. We just tend to lose them."

Though most fans regard Chinga simply as a killer doll episode, it delved a bit into Mulder's private world. So bored was he without Scully around that he took to tossing pencils into the air so that they would stick in the ceiling of his office. When Scully called to check in, he was busy watching the real-life program When Animals Attack. The essential Mulder, yes? "It's funny, but on the show you saw it was actually When Animals Attack that he was watching. In the script, it was a porn video and I just SAID it was When Animals Attack," Duchonvy asserts, laughing loudly. "The network censor made us change it. They wouldn't allow the sounds of love-making on the show. The joke was that Mulder says 'It's When Animals Attack' when it's really porn. It then became him saying 'It's When Animals Attack' and it REALLY is When Animals Attack, which was cute but not as funny. I like that kind of stuff. It's amusing, but it stands in for true character development, which I would like to see more of. I would like to see deeper writing, not just quirky bits or gags. I do understand it, though, when the writers try to fill in the finer details about a character like Mulder, whom the audience already knows pretty well."

Season five concluded with The End, which offered much intrigue but, in hindsight, little set-up for the impending feature. It brought Cigarette Smoking Man back from his supposed death. It put on display Gibson, apparently a successful human-alien hybrid. It witnessed the blazing devastation of Mulder's office and all the coveted X files - save Samantha Mulder's, whisked away by the Cigarette Smoking Man. It furthered the roiling tension between Mulder and Agent Spender (Chris Owens) and, finally, it set up an interesting scenario by introducing Agent Diana Fowley (Mimi Rogers), a woman whose presence and unexplained role in Mulder's life - anyone catch the flashes of wedding band? - clearly disturbed Scully. Jealousy perhaps? Stay tuned, for Rogers, Duchovny's co-star in The Rapture, is signed to appear in at least three sixth season episodes.

Of course, it's too early to discuss the forthcoming season in any detail.

It could be Duchovny's last, though it seems likely that he'll stick around to the bitter end IF, and only if, the bitter end is definitely season seven. He would love nothing more than for the series to wrap tomorrow, with everyone then regrouping every few years for a feature. Why? Two reasons: One, he wants to do other things, display other facets of his talent before everyone in the universe believes he actually IS Fox Mulder and not David Duchovny. Two, he's understandably X-ed out, after shooting season four of the show, then the film, then season five, not to mention footage for the X Files CD-ROM game, all back-to-back over two-plus years.

"I do OK when I get to do other things," Duchovny says. "I was proud of my Saturday Night Live. It came off well. People laughed. Doing The Larry Sanders Show [on which he guested several times, playing himself with a crush on Garry Shandling's Sanders] was always fun. Half the time people want to tell me that I'm just Mulder, that I can ONLY play Mulder. Half the time I can go out and show people that I'm not. Guess which half I prefer.

"Every time Mulder smiles, people say, 'God, itwas great to see you smile. Mulder never smiles.' I say, 'Mulder smiles a whole lot. He smiles at least once a show.' People get these ideas in their heads and they're impossible to shake. But, to be honest with you, Mulder is every bit as vulnerable and quirky as Ally McBeal. I think Mulder has pretty good legs, too.

"And, absolutely, I DO get tired of The X Files," concludes David Duchovny. "You've seen it in certain interviews where I denigrate the show and everybody that has anything to do with it. That's just me getting testy. It's my way of saying, 'I can do more. Give me a chance to go and do it.' It has really been more than two years straight between all the X Files projects. It has been FIVE years. There's not time to do the kinds of movies I want to do. I shot Playing God in six weeks. It was perceived as a big-budget movie and it wasn't. It was a $6 million movie that we shot in a small amount of time. I don't have the chance to go out and do Batman - not that I would WANT to do Batman - or some other big film with a polished script and a three-month shooting schedule. So, The X Files has been my life for five years, really, and I sometimes chafe at that.

"Indeed I do."

Spelling, Ian. October, 1998. "Prince of Paranoia." SciFi TV.