From The Daily Telegraph,
August 4, 1998
1998 The Daily Telegraph
by Richard Barber
"I regard myself as a red blooded male" David Duchovny gave up a PhD to
act - and now finds himself a sex symbol, thanks to The X-Files. Richard
Barber meets him
THE SUIT would not look out of place in an Italian menswear advertisement
and the hair has been carefully gelled. David Duchovny certainly looks the
part of the quintessential Hollywood star, and yet there is a curious air
of detachment about him, as if he were trying to say: "Look, don't take this
seriously - I don't." At 37, the man from The X-Files finds himself billed
as a sex symbol, with his face displayed on magazine covers, posters and
T-shirts, but he is too smart to imply that this is due to anything more
than amazing good fortune. Among the ranks of Hollywood beefcake, Duchovny
is probably the closest any comes to being an intellectual. Although his
mother, a school teacher, was convinced he had a future as an academic, he
abandoned a PhD at Yale University when his dabbling in student drama led
to offers of work as an actor. An unpublished novel languishes in his top
drawer, and he is now threatening to publish a book of his poems (which,
on the evidence of the work that has escaped so far, promises to be fairly
sophomoric). He owes his fame entirely to his role as Fox Mulder, the fictional
FBI Special Agent who is convinced that aliens are about to take over the
planet. As new breeds of alien are invented for his weekly excursions, he
gives a convincing portrait of a man obsessed - to the extent that he never
seems to mind that his investigations are all, ultimately, in vain.
The plots may be tosh but the resilient Mulder has become a television folk
hero. "I respect his singlemindedness; the energy he puts into unfruitful
endeavours, his tilting at windmills, his heroic perseverance in the face
of all failure," says Duchovny. "This is a guy who hasn't solved one case
in five years. That gives him a kind of pathos. "I respect, too, the fact
that he doesn't give a damn about what anyone else thinks of him. That's
true only of very powerful people, usually those with a strong belief in
something else." None of this explains the extraordinary success of The X-Files,
which attracts an audience of 36 million in America alone, and has now been
turned into a film.
Duchovny says the programme's pull is directly related to the fact that society
is becoming more and more secular; the resulting vacuum, he says, is often
filled with the supernatural and the metaphysical. "I believe most human
beings have a need for something more than just the tangible. People want
to believe in something else - an alien or an angel. X-Files feeds that desire."
Ironically, Duchovny's doctoral thesis, never completed, was on magic and
technology. "Magic has been replaced by technology in the modern world,"
he explains. "We're flying now - something that would have been regarded
as magical in a previous age. "Magic has a certain morality attached to it:
there's good magic and bad magic. But we don't treat technology that way
- it's all good. And I'm not so sure about that sometimes. My thesis would
have dealt with how you infuse technology with magic." In the event, that
is more or less what he has ended up doing in The X-Files. The new film features
an alien civilisation and a plot that involves saving mankind from the
Apocalypse. It is no more daft than anything dreamt up by Ian Fleming; the
special effects are truly spectacular, the script is spare and just this
side of risible.
Duchovny has lived with Fox Mulder for five years now, working 14-hour days,
10 months out of 12, in Vancouver, although his marriage last year to the
actress Téa Leoni hardened his resolve to have the action moved to
Los Angeles. Even so, two months does not leave much time for launching a
film career - and he admits to being envious of that other television sex
symbol, George Clooney, star of the hospital drama ER. "That's an ensemble
piece," he says wistfully, "which means that George was able to star, for
example, in Batman on the big screen while continuing to make his series."
Like Clooney, Duchovny seems to have perfected the art of revelling in his
current "Hollywood hunk" status ("It's flattering!"), while ensuring that
everyone knows he takes it with a pinch of salt. He even took a relaxed approach
when a newspaper claimed he was receiving treatment as a sex addict - though
privately, he wasn't too pleased. "No, that did embarrass me," he says. "I
regard myself as a red-blooded male who likes pretty women. I hate, on the
one hand, to promote a kind of cavalier attitude towards sex - you know:
have as much as you want and don't care about the other person. On the other
hand, I also hate to promote any kind of shame about healthy sexual appetites.
"I mean - why not do what you want to do? I wasn't raping anybody. No one
was underage. It seems to me that, as long as you're consenting adults, everybody
should shut up about it." This is the man who told Playboy magazine that
his favourite part of a woman's body is "where the back of the upper thigh
turns into the rear end. It's soft. It's fragrant. It's got everything you
need. You could build a house there and be happy". When I repeat this to
him, he smiles resignedly. "Does that make me a sex addict, though? I don't
think so. It makes me someone who is unembarrassed about wanting to celebrate
something worth celebrating." And, by the way, he says, the story that he
checked into a clinic to deal with his sex addiction was a total fabrication.
Even so, he can be his own worst enemy. Didn't he once pose nude - save for
a strategically placed inverted teacup (a shot that is much accessed on the
Internet)? He raises both hands, palms outwards, in a gesture that happily
acknowledges defeat. "But the idea for that particular shot was mine. It
wasn't as if somebody said: 'There's the Armani. There's the Versace. There's
the teacup'. "My manager is English. She has a Téa service; there was a cigar
nearby; inspiration hit. I was changing and I suddenly grabbed a teacup.
I thought it would be funny if I were holding the cigar with a cup over my
genitals and pretending to pour tea. For some reason, it just struck me as
goofy." Somebody recently asked him about his wife's opinion of that picture.
"First," he said, "I think she thought it was funny. Second, I think she
thought I was an idiot for doing it. And finally, she's vowed never to drink
out of that cup." The photograph, taken some years ago, found its way into
the public arena after Duchovny landed the role of Mulder. "One of the things
they pay you for is the loss of privacy that comes with fame," he says, sounding
not too perturbed. "Because of the popular conception of money, I believe
the public feel they have the right, if you get paid this much, to damn well
know anything they want to know about you. I don't agree. But I understand
where people get that idea. And, yes, it is an obscene amount of money to
make." (He is said to earn pounds 70,000 per episode.) "Téa's great
with money," he continues. "She reads the financial pages, she invests her
own money. The way I think of money is that I'm in this room, and my money
is sitting in a pile in the next room, and I'm never even going to look at
it. It's comforting to know that it's there. But it scares me - I don't know
what to do with it. "I still live the way I used to live when I didn't make
any money - except that I have a really nice house now, and I can eat out
whenever I like. Oh, and I can buy any CD I want. But it makes me a little
uneasy to be paid this much." He is the middle child - he has an older brother
and a younger sister - of a Jewish father and a Scottish mother. ("Are you
worried I might not pay for lunch?" he asks, playfully.) The family celebrated
both Christmas and Hanukkah, which he never saw as any kind of conflict -
"Christ was a Jew; both religions are diverging paths of the same monotheistic
tradition".
HIS PARENTS split when David was 11, and his father Amram, a public relations
executive, moved first to Boston, and then to Paris, where he now writes
novels. His mother, Meg, brought the children up in New York. "She was the
person who tucked me in at night, but I wish I'd had more contact with my
father." The separation left him more serious. "I wasn't an adult. I didn't
have the emotional knowledge to understand why a man and a woman would get
together in the first place, and I certainly didn't know what would compel
them to break apart." His parents' divorce might also explain why he elected
not to marry until he reached his mid-thirties. "Maybe, but then I was having
a fine time being single." He met Téa - star of the recent hit film
Deep Impact - through the agent they share. Given his track record with women,
how on earth did he know that she was the one? "Precisely because of my track
record," he says. "I've been in love before, plenty of times. I'd had one
girlfriend for four years. But I realise now I'd never thought seriously
about marriage until I started to be with Téa. I only knew that this
was it because I'd never felt that way before - it wasn't like anything else."
Marriages between stars, of course, have a habit of combusting, but Duchovny
is not convinced that Hollywood has a higher statistical failure rate than
anywhere else. "It just has a higher profile when things go wrong. I think
it's also probably true to say that the public focus can't help a troubled
marriage. What you need is peace and quiet." So, the future looks rosy? "Well,
it always does, doesn't it?" Well, no. "All right. But speaking for myself,
I'm the opposite of disheartened." He pauses. "What is the opposite of
disheartened? Heartened, I suppose. You may say that when it comes to the
future, I'm heartened." David Duchovny stars in The X-Files, which opens
at cinemas nationwide on August 21.
